WOMEN QUOTES XVIII

quotations about women

Next to God we are indebted to women, first for life itself, and then for making it worth having.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought

Tags: Christian Nestell Bovee


Woman's great strength lies in being late or absent. Presence immediately reveals the weak points of our beloved; when she is absent she become one of the sylph-like figures of our adolescence whom we endowed with perfection.

ANDRÉ MAUROIS

An Art of Living


No man with any sense assumes that a woman's words mean to her exactly what they mean to him.

REX STOUT

The Mother Hunt


A woman well bred and well taught, furnished with the additional accomplishments of knowledge and behaviour, is a creature without comparison. Her society is the emblem of sublimer enjoyments, her person is angelic, and her conversation heavenly. She is all softness and sweetness, peace, love, wit, and delight. She is every way suitable to the sublimest wish, and the man that has such a one to his portion, has nothing to do but to rejoice in her, and be thankful.

DANIEL DEFOE

The Education of Women

Tags: Daniel Defoe


Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.

CESARE PAVESE

This Business of Living, February 19, 1937


It has been our experience that women usually prefer thin, undernourished, flatchested females, dressed to the teeth, as a concept of "feminine beauty" -- and that men prefer exactly the opposite: voluptuous, well-rounded and undressed. The women's idealization of woman is actually a male counterpart, competing with man in society; man's view of women is far more truly feminine.

HUGH HEFNER

The Realist, May, 1961

Tags: Hugh Hefner


While a woman is losing confidence in a man she is usually reposing it in another.

LEWIS F. KORNS

Thoughts


A woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.

J. M. COETZEE

Disgrace

Tags: J. M. Coetzee


There are two kinds of spiritual law, two kinds of conscience, one in man and another, altogether different, in woman. They do not understand each other; but in practical life the woman is judged by man's law, as though she were not a woman but a man.

HENRIK IBSEN

From Ibsen's Workshop

Tags: Henrik Ibsen


Oh! too convincing -- dangerously dear --
In woman's eye the unanswerable tear!

LORD BYRON

The Corsair

Tags: Lord Byron


A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.

COCO CHANEL

The Gospel According to Coco Chanel

Tags: Coco Chanel


There are few virtuous women who are not tired of their part.

FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

Tags: Francois de La Rochefoucauld


The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The Philanderer

Tags: George Bernard Shaw


Women are like that they don't acquire knowledge of people we are for that they are just born with a practical fertility of suspicion that makes a crop every so often and usually right they have an affinity for evil for supplying whatever the evil lacks in itself for drawing it about them instinctively as you do bed-clothing in slumber fertilizing the mind for it until the evil has served its purpose whether it ever existed or no.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

The Sound and the Fury

Tags: William Faulkner


Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps or old snuff-boxes, even to pictures or statues. But the example of other collections should be a warning to us to diversify, to have not one woman only but several.

MARCEL PROUST

The Guermantes Way

Tags: Marcel Proust


It is usual for a woman, even though she may ardently desire to give herself to a man, to feign reluctance, to simulate alarm or indignation. She must be brought to consent by urgent pleading, by lies, adjurations, and promises. I know that only professional prostitutes are accustomed to answer such an invitation with a perfectly frank assent -- prostitutes, or simple-minded, immature girls.

STEFAN ZWEIG

Letter from an Unknown Woman

Tags: Stefan Zweig


When [Mike] Pence says he will not eat alone with a woman who is not his wife, he is perpetuating the patriarchal notion that women are either Mary, Jesus' pure virgin Mother, or Eve, a temptress, a liability. It perhaps is no coincidence that Pence reportedly refers to his Mary -- wife Karen Pence -- as "Mother." For Pence and many evangelical men, all women who are not Marys are Eves, placed peripherally in their lives as temptations to resist. Every Eve is one alone-meeting away from destroying a godly man. In order to protect their honor and reputation, these men cut us off completely. This reduces all women to a monolithic sexual identity. To men like Pence, we are not complex, complete, sacred vessels full of intellect and divinity and grit. We are not fully formed spiritual beings; we are not fully formed citizens. We are exclusively sexual creatures. This mistrust of women is pumped through the veins of the Christian church and, apparently, the executive branch of the United States of America.

GLENNON DOYLE MELTON

"Mike Pence's Marriage Rule Holds Women Back", Time, April 3, 2017


Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.

DORIS LESSING

The Golden Notebook

Tags: Doris Lessing


A woman's love, like lichens upon a rock, will still grow where even charity can find no soil to nurture itself.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought


No man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in his pocket.

REX STOUT

Some Buried Caesar

Tags: Rex Stout