quotations about women
Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such manmade crimes as "cruelty."
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Tender Is the Night
Women are getting more lead roles in Hollywood, which is fantastic. Bolstered by the box office success of movies like Trainwreck, The Hunger Games franchise and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, women in Hollywood have seen some small returns on their ongoing efforts at chipping away at the film industry's white, male problem. But, the numbers for diversity -- and, by extension, representation -- remain dismal. That's no surprise to anyone paying attention.
MEGAN REYNOLDS
"Study: Women Are Getting More Leads In Film, But Alas, They Are Mostly White", The Frisky, February 10, 2016
Woman is the salvation or destruction of the family. She carries its destinies in the folds of her mantle.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
journal, December 11, 1872
It's a strange thing to think of a man as can lift a chair with his teeth, and walk fifty mile on end, trembling and turning hot and cold at only a look from one woman out of all the rest i' the world. It's a mystery we can give no account of.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
Women are slaves to their beauty.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
Where neither love nor hatred is in the game, a woman's game is mediocre.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Beyond Good and Evil
I have often felt that I would find it more complicated, troublesome and unpleasant to ascertain the feelings by which a woman lives than to plumb the innermost thoughts of an earthworm.
OSAMU DAZAI
No Longer Human
A high degree of intellectual refinement in the female is the surest pledge society can have for the improvement of the male.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Women are allowed to enter the spaces of the senses, the space of the body, the spaces opened by sensations, all kinds of feelings, but women are not allowed to enter the spaces of reason to the same extent, that is to say the space of ideas, political ideas.
CARMEN BOULLOSA
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1995
While women once acquired relationship skills to "hook," "snare," or "catch" a husband who would provide access to economic security and social status, the position of contemporary women has not changed that radically. Much of our success still depends on our attunement to "male culture," our ability to please men, and our readiness to conform to the masculine values of our institutions.
HARRIET LERNER
The Dance of Intimacy: A Woman's Guide to Courageous Acts of Change in Key Relationships
To desire to be perpetually in the society of a pretty woman until the end of one's days, is as if, because one likes good wine, one wished always to have one's mouth full of it.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
The Silence of Colonel Bramble
There's a lot of pressure on women to fulfill certain fantasies. They expect you to be a little bit of a tart, to flirt with all the men. A lot of women do it. But I'm not doing that. I talk with these guys about their wives and kids right away. When they say inappropriate things, I let them, because boys will be boys, but I'm not looking to participate in their conversations.
JESSICA ALBA
Marie Claire Magazine, March 2008
There is such a thing as the wrong woman. She makes a man a fraction.... But the right woman! She multiplies a man.
HORACE HOLLEY
"The Genius"
The societies to which I have been exposed seemed to me largely machines for the suppression of women.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
All the Pretty Horses
It had always bothered Tom that women thought they could win an argument with a man simply by appealing to his baser instincts, by holding out the mere possibility of award-winning carnal knowledge. It was the gender equivalent of a preemptive nuclear strike. He thought it unfair and, quite frankly, disrespectful of the entire male population. And yet he heard himself saying, "Look, baby doll, I don't want to argue either."
DAVID BALDACCI
The Christmas Train
If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.
PLATO
The Republic
Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody.
JANE AUSTEN
Mansfield Park
As God is my witness, the more I deal with women, the more I like my cat.
P. N. ELROD
The Dark Sleep
A man who admires a fine woman, has yet not more reason to wish himself her husband, than one who admired the Hesperian fruit, would have had to wish himself the dragon that kept it.
ALEXANDER POPE
"Thoughts on Various Subjects"
You don't know a woman until you have had a letter from her.
ADA LEVERSON
Tenterhooks