quotations about women
It is pointless for a woman to be young unless pretty, or to be pretty unless young.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
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
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
Frailty, thy name is woman.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
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, you overheated dipsomaniacs, never passing up a chance to wangle a drink, a great boon to bartenders but a bane to us--not to mention our crockery and our woolens!
ARISTOPHANES
Women at the Thesmophoria
When women love, they forgive everything, even our crimes; when they do not love, they cannot forgive anything, not even our virtues.
HONORE DE BALZAC
The Muse of the Department
What we desire is not to possess a woman, but to be the only one to possess her.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, November 13, 1938
There is no beast, no rush of fire, like woman so untamed. She calmly goes her way where even panthers would be shamed.
ARISTOPHANES
Lysistrata
Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they'll spit on you.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Women
It is indeed a misfortune for a woman to be without beauty, as with men the eye is the chief arbiter of qualities in the sex. Her beauty is her capital--her worth in the market matrimonial depends upon it. With her the Virtues are less reverenced when unaccompanied by the Graces. The sex understand this very well; and hence they seek mainly to make captive the eye, knowing the mind and heart will follow as a matter of course.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
He who desires a lifetime of happiness with a beautiful woman desires to enjoy the taste of wine by keeping his mouth always full of it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Maxims for Revolutionists
A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, "Perhaps this is THE man."
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
A man who from the beginning has long been soaked in the languid atmosphere of a woman, the scent of her hands, her bosom, her knees, her hair, her lithe and flowing clothes ... has acquired a delicacy of skin, a refinement of tone, a kind of androgyny without which the toughest and most virile of geniuses remains, when it comes to artistic perfection, an incomplete being.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Un mangeur d'opium"
Your anatomy is a mystery that nobody bothers explaining to us. Even when we think we have mastered one woman's body, every body is different.
CHRIS ABANI
"What Men Aren't Telling Us", O Magazine, July 2008
Woman loves or hates: she knows no middle course.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS
The Moral Sayings of Publilius Syrus
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
The much-quoted immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary occurred but once so that the world might know that Almighty God, when He so chooses, has no need of men, though He cannot dispense with women.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
Baltasar and Blimunda
The beauty of a woman transcends all other forms of beauty, as well in the sweetness of its suggestions, as in the fervor of the admiration it awakens. The beauty of a lovely woman is an inspiration, a sweet delirium, a gentle madness. Her looks are love-potions. Heaven itself is never so clearly revealed to us as in the face of a beautiful woman.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Seen through the glow of a building orgasm, a woman seems to blaze with angelic glory.
LARRY NIVEN
Ringworld