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Women

female adult human
(Redirected from Ladies)

Women are adult human females. Before adulthood, a female child or adolescent is referred to as a girl.

Auld Nature swears, the lovely dears
Her noblest work she classes, O:
Her 'prentice hand she tried on man,
An' then she made the lasses, O.
—Robert Burns

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A

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  • If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.
    • Abigail Adams, Letter to John Adams (31 March 1776); L. H. Butterfield (ed.) Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 1 (1963), pp. 369–71 [1]
  • Patriotism in the female sex is the most disinterested of all virtues. Excluded from honors and from offices, we cannot attach ourselves to the State or Government from having held a place of eminence. ... Yet all history and every age exhibit instances of patriotic virtue in the female sex; which considering our situation equals the most heroic of yours.
    • Abigail Adams, Letter to John Adams (17 June 1782); L. H. Butterfield; M. Friedlaender (eds.) Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 4 (1973) [2]
  • Women have, commonly, a very positive moral sense; that which they will, is right; that which they reject, is wrong; and their will, in most cases, ends by settling the moral.
  • She trips along the street, a flashing wonder,
    Dazzling enigma! Courtesan or maid?
    Temple of chastity, or hall of trade?
    An angel-presence, or a soul of plunder
    Casting the doors of sanctitude asunder?
    A beauteousness, by love and laughter swayed,
    Or death in immemorial masquerade?
    A dainty dawn-song, or a snarl of thunder?
  • Sure, Nature form'd me of her softest mould,
    Enfeebled all my soul with tender passions,
    And sunk me ev'n below my own weak sex:
    Pity and love, by turns, oppress my heart.
  • The glowing dames of Zama's royal court
    Have faces finsh'd with more exalted charms.
    • Joseph Addison, Cato, a Tragedy (1713), act 1, sc. 4 (loq. Syphax)
  • At length I've acted my severest part!
    I feel the woman breaking in upon me,
    And melt about my heart: my tears will flow.
    • Joseph Addison, Cato, a Tragedy (1713), act 3, sc. 1 (loq. Lucia)
  • Loveliest of women! heaven is in thy soul,
    Beauty and virtue shine forever round thee,
    Bright'ning each other! thou art all divine!
    • Joseph Addison, Cato, a Tragedy (1713), act 3, sc. 2 (loq. Portius)
  • Where love once pleads admission to our hearts,
    In spite of all the virtue we can boast,
    The woman that deliberates is lost.
    • Joseph Addison, Cato, a Tragedy (1713), act 4, sc. 1 (loq. Marcus)
 
Man's mind in a woman's heart. —Æschylus
  • Μέλει γὰρ ἀνδρί, μὴ γυνὴ βουλευέτω,
    τἄξωθεν: ἔνδον δ᾽ οὖσα μὴ βλάβην τίθει.
    • It is for the man to take care of business outside the house; let no woman make decrees in those matters. Keep inside and do no harm!
    • Æschylus, Seven against Thebes, ll. 200–201 (tr. H. W. Smyth, 1926)
  • The fair sex is governed by desire and women care much for pomp and pride. Hence a king should collect gems for their satisfaction. Kings and persons, ambitious of lofty stations in life, should not be excessively fond of female company, nor visit them much.
  • We must find the right use for every ability. The era of the Mother of the World is not a return of the age of Amazons.
  • Divination seems heightened and raised to its highest power in woman.
  • A flimsy shift on a bunker cot,
    With a thin dirk-slot through the bosom spot
    And the lace stiff-dry in a purplish blot.
         Or was she wench...
           Or some shuddering maid...?
         That dared the knife
           And that took the blade!
    By God! she was stuff for a plucky jade!
  • Women wish to be loved without a why or a wherefore; not because they are pretty, or good, or well-bred, or graceful, or intelligent, but because they are themselves.
  • Thracian filly, tell me why
    You look askance when I come nigh,
    And flee unkind, as though I knew
    Naught of how to manage you?
    Should it please me, truth to tell,
    I could bridle you right well,
    And take and ride you hand on rein
    Up the course and down again;
    And if instead you graze your fill
    And frisk it in the meadow still,
    'Tis but because a man like me
    Knows how long to leave you free.
  • Horns to bulls wise Nature lends:
    Horses she with hoofs defends:
    Hares with nimble feet relieves:
    Dreadful teeth to lions gives:
    Fishes learns through streams to slide:
    Birds through yielding air to glide:
    Men with courage she supplies:
    But to women these denies.
    What then gives she? Beauty, this
    Both their arms and armour is:
    She, that can this weapon use,
    Fire and sword with ease subdues.
  • I’m a woman
    Phenomenally.
    Phenomenal woman,
    That’s me.
  • Audax ad omnia fœmina, quæ vel amat vel odit.
    • A woman will dare anything, when she loves or hates.
    • Anonymous. Reported in King (1904), p. 387, no. 3022
  • Les femmes peuvent tout, parcequ’elles gouvernent les personnes qui gouvernent tout.
    • Women can effect everything, because they govern those who govern everything.
    • Anonymous. Cf. Plutarch, Vita Catonis Majoris, c. 8(4): "We Romans govern the world, but we are governed by our wives." Reported in King (1904), p. 393, no. 3072
  • A man shall trust not   the oath of a maid,
       Nor the word a woman speaks;
    For their hearts on a whirling   wheel were fashioned,
       And fickle their breasts were formed.
  • Valkea kesäinen päivä,    neitivalta valkeampi;
    vilu on rauta pakkasessa,    vilumpi miniävalta.
    Niin on neiti taattolassa,    kuin marja hyvällä maalla,
    niin miniä miehelässä,    kuin on koira kahlehissa.
    Harvoin saapi orja lemmen,    ei miniä milloinkana.
    • Brilliant is the day in summer,    but a maiden's lot is brighter.
      And the frost makes cold the iron,    yet the new bride's lot is colder.
      In her father's house a maiden    lives like strawberry in the garden,
      But a bride in house of husband,    lives like house-dog tightly fettered.
      To a slave comes rarely pleasure;    to a wedded damsel never.
    • Kalevala (pub. 1835; rev. 1849), runo 8 (tr. W. F. Kirby, 1907)
  • Oh the gladness of their gladness when they're glad,
    And the sadness of their sadness when they're sad;
    But the gladness of their gladness, and the sadness of their sadness,
    Are as nothing to their badness when they're bad.
    • Anonymous, "Epigram on Women", in Notes and Queries, 9th s., no. 9 (April 12, 1902), p. 288
  • Oh, the shrewdness of their shrewdness when they are shrewd,
    And the rudeness of their rudeness when they're rude;
    But the shrewdness of their shrewdness and the rudeness of their rudeness,
    Are as nothing to their goodness when they're good.
    • Anonymous; answer to preceding
  • The world is full of care, much like unto a bubble,
    Women and care, and care and women, and women and care and trouble.
    • Anonymous epigram (attributed by Nathaniel Ward to a lady at the court of the Queen of Bohemia), Simple Cobler's Boy (1648), p. 25
  • Geologist is the only person who can talk to a woman and use the words 'dike', 'thrust', 'bed', 'orogeny', 'cleavage', and 'subduction' in the same sentence without facing a civil suit.
    • Anonymous, in Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (2007), p. 863
  • Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum: Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus.
    • Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
    • Anonymous, Ave Maria ("Hail Mary")
 
The buck bounds here and there,
Whilst the doe has narrow eyes.
But when the two rabbits run side by side,
How can you tell the female from the male?
  • I open my east chamber door,
    And sit on my west chamber bed.
    I take off my battle cloak,
    And put on my old-time clothes.
    I adjust my wispy hair at the window sill,
    And apply my bisque makeup by the mirror.
    I step out to see my comrades-in-arms,
    They are all surprised and astounded:
    "We travelled twelve years together,
    Yet didn't realise Mulan was a lady!"
    The buck bounds here and there,
    Whilst the doe has narrow eyes.
    But when the two rabbits run side by side,
    How can you tell the female from the male?
  • I think Nature hath lost the mould
    Where she her shape did take;
    Or else I doubt if Nature could
    So fair a creature make.
    • Anonymous, "A Praise of his Lady", in Tottel's Miscellany (1557). The Earl of Surrey wrote similar lines, "A Praise of his Love" (before 1547)
  • The virtue of her lively looks
    Excels the precious stone;
    I wish to have none other books
    To read or look upon.
  • She was not made out of his head, Sir,
    To rule and to govern the man;
    Nor was she made out of his feet, Sir,
    By man to be trampled upon.
    * * * * *
    But she did come forth from his side, Sir,
    His equal and partner to be;
    And now they are coupled together,
    She oft proves the top of the tree.
    • Anonymous, in Notes and Queries, 3rd s., no. 11 (23 February 1867), p. 163
  • Vente quid levius? fulgur. Quid fulgure? flamma
    Flamma quid? mulier. Quid mulier? nihil.
    • What is lighter than the wind? A feather.
      What is lighter than a feather? fire.
      What lighter than fire? a woman.
      What lighter than a woman? Nothing.
    • Anonymous, Harleian Manuscript, no. 3362, fol. 47. Reported in Hoyt's (1922), p. 890
  • There is a Lady sweet and kind,
    Was never face so pleased my mind;
    I did but see her passing by,
    And yet I love her till I die.
  • Where is the man who has the power and skill
    To stem the torrent of a woman's will?
    For if she will, she will, you may depend on't;
    And if she won't, she won't; so there's an end on't.
    • From the Pillar Erected on the Mount in the Dane John Field, Canterbury. The Examiner (31 May 1829)
  • Woman! o'er whose sunken eyes
    The last rushlight glimmer dies,
    Lay thine ill-paid toil away
    Till the morrow's hungry day;
    Seek the respite and release
    Heaven will give in dreams of peace:
             Fold thy hands!
    Earth denies thee food,—not rest:
    Fold them o'er thy patient breast.
  • Where women are honoured, there the gods are pleased.
    • Anonymous, Manusmriti, ch. 3, sect. 56 (tr. Georg Bühler, 1886)
  • In childhood a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, when her lord is dead to her sons; a woman must never be independent.
    • Anonymous, Manusmriti, ch. 5, sect. 148 (tr. Georg Bühler, 1886)
  • Early one morning, just as the sun was rising,
    I heard a maid sing in the valley below:
    "Oh, don't deceive me; Oh, never leave me!
    How could you use a poor maiden so?"
  • I syng of a mayden
       That is makeles;
    Kyng of alle kynges
       To here sone che ches.
  • Moder and maydyn
       Was never non but che;
    Well may swych a lady
       Godes moder be.
  • A womane is a worthy wyght,
    She serveth a man both daye and nyght;
    Therto she puttyth all her myght,
       And yet she hathe but care and woo.
  • Sans les femmes le commencement de notre vie serait privé de secours, le milieu de plaisirs, et la fin de consolation.
    • Without woman, the beginning of life would be destitute of succour, the middle of pleasure, and the end of consolation.
    • Anonymous. Reported in King (1904), p. 397, no. 3101
  • The woman whose love you desire is a rib of the Devil himself!
 
Am I not a woman and a sister?
  • Whilst Adam slept, Eve from his side arose:
    Strange! his first sleep should be his last repose.
  • Thus I the Womens Secrets have survey'd,
    And let them see how curiously they're made;
    And that, tho' they of different Sexes be,
    Yet in the Whole they are the same as we:
    For those that have the strictest Searchers been,
    Find Women are but Men turn'd Out-side-in:
    And Men, if they but cast their Eyes about,
    May find they're Women, with their In-side-out.
  • La langue des femmes est leur épée, et elles ne la laissent pas rouiller.
    • Women's tongue is their sword, and they don't let it rust.
    • Proverb, in P. M. Quitard, Dictionnaire des Proverbes (Paris, 1842), p. 381. Reported in King (1904), p. 161, no. 1248
  • Femina consilio prudens, pia, prole beata,
    Auxit amicitiis, auxit honore virum.
 
I do not demand equal pay for any women save those who do equal work in value.
—Susan B. Anthony
  • I do not demand equal pay for any women save those who do equal work in value. Scorn to be coddled by your employers; make them understand that you are in their service as workers, not as women.
  • Senile illud facinus.
    • That wicked old thing.
    • Apuleius, Metamorphoses, 4, p. 148, 9. Said of an old woman. Cf. Terence, Adelphoe, 4, 7, 43: Senex delirans.—"A doting old man." and Cicero, De senectute, 11, 36: Senilis stultitia.—"The foolishness of old age." Reported in King (1904), p. 315, no. 2488
  • Of all the girls that e'er was seen,
    There's none so fine as Nelly.
  • Οὐκ ἂν μύροισι γραῦς ἐοῦσ᾿ ἠλείφεο.
    • Old women should not seek to be perfumed.
    • Archilochus, fragment, in Plutarch, Pericles, ch. 28. sec. 5 (tr. J. and W. Langhorne, 1770): Pericles to Elpinice; cf. Athenaeus, bk. 15, sec. 37
  •      τῇ μὲν ὕδωρ ἐφόρει
    δολοφρονέουσα χειρί, τἠτέρῃ δὲ πῦρ.
    •      With guileful thoughts she bore
      In one hand water, in the other fire.
    • Archilochus, fragment, in Plutarch, De primo frigido, sec. 950e (tr. H. Cherniss and W. C. Helmbold, 1957); cf. De communibus notitiis adversus Stoicos, sec. 1070a; Demetrius, ch. 35, sec. 2
  • Lysistrata: My heart is hot within me, Calonice,
    And sore I grieve for sake of womankind,
    Because the men account us all to be
    Sly, shifty rogues,
    Calonice: And so, by Zeus, we are.
  • These impossible women! How they do get around us!
    The poet was right: Can’t live with them, or without them!
    • Aristophanes, Lysistrata, ll. 1024–42 (tr. Dudley Fitts, 1954)
  • They're always abusing the women,
       As a terrible plague to men:
    They say we're the root of all evil,
       And repeat it again and again;
    Of war and quarrels and bloodshed,
       All mischief, be what it may:
    And pray, then, why do you marry us,
       If we're all the plagues you say?
    And why do you take such care of us,
       And keep us so safe at home,
    And are never easy a moment,
       If ever we chance to roam?
    When you ought to be thanking heaven
       That your Plague is out of the way—
    You all keep fussing and fretting—
       "Where is my Plague today?"
    If a Plague peeps out of the window,
       Up go the eyes of the men;
    If she hides then they all keep staring
       Until she looks out again.
  • Woman is more compassionate than man, more easily moved to tears, at the same time is more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold and to strike. She is, furthermore, more prone to despondency and less hopeful than the man, more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more deceptive, and of more retentive memory. She is also more wakeful, more shrinking, more difficult to rouse to action, and requires a smaller quantity of nutriment.
  • The excellence of females in regard to person, is beauty and stature; in regard to the mind, temperance, and fondness for employment, without meanness.
  • Haughtiness of women has been the ruin of many tyrannies.
  • It is easy to find persons who will share prosperity; but, except a very few and very good ones, women are not willing to share misfortunes.
    • Pseudo-Aristotle, Œconomica, bk. 1, ch. 7 (tr. E. Walford, 1853)
  • An excellent thing it is when life is leaving,—
       Leaving with gloom and gladness, joys and cares,—
    The strong heart failing, and the high soul grieving
       With strangest thoughts, and wild unwonted fears;
    Then, then a woman's low soft sympathy
       Comes like an angel's voice to teach us how to die.
    But a most excellent thing it is in youth,
       When the fond lover hears the loved one's tone,
    That fears, but longs, to syllable the truth,—
       How their two hearts are one, and she his own;
    It makes sweet human music—oh! the spells
       That haunt the trembling tale a bright-eyed maiden tells!
    • Edwin Arnold, "Woman's Voice", in Poems, Narrative And Lyrical (1853), p. 158
  • The Musmee has a small brown face,
       "Musk-melon seed" its perfect shape:
    Jetty arch’d eyebrows; nose to grace
       The rosy mouth beneath; a nape,
    And neck, and chin, and smooth, soft cheeks
       Carv’d out of sunburn’d ivory,
    With teeth, which, when she smiles or speaks,
       Pearl merchants might come leagues to see!
    • Edwin Arnold, "The Musmee", st. 2, in Potiphar's Wife, and Other Poems (1892), p. 62
  • On one she smiled, and he was blest;
    She smiles elsewhere—we make a din!
    But 'twas not love which heaved her breast,
    Fair child!—it was the bliss within.
  • She smiles, and smiles, and will not sigh,
    While we for hopeless passion die:
    Yet she could love, those eyes declare,
    Were but men nobler than they are.
    Eagerly once her gracious ken
    Was turn'd upon the sons of men;
    But light the serious visage grew—
    She look'd, and smiled, and saw them through.
    Our petty souls, our strutting wits,
    Our labour'd puny passion-fits,—
    Oh, may she scorn them still, till we
    Scorn them as bitterly as she.
    • Matthew Arnold, "Excuse", in Empedocles on Etna, &c. (1852), p. 75
  • With women the heart argues, not the mind.
    • Matthew Arnold, Merope (1858), p. 21 (Polyphontes)
  • A woman, O my friends, has one desire—
    To see secure, to live with, those she loves.
    • Matthew Arnold, Merope (1858), p. 37 (Merope)
  • Tel est le sort des femmes galantes: elles se donnent à Dieu, quand le diable n'en veut plus.
    • Women give themselves to God when the devil wants nothing more to do with them.
    • Sophie Arnould, in Galanteriana (1814), vol. 2, p. 445
  • La femme est un grand enfant qu'on amuse avec des joujoux, qu'on endort avec des louanges, et qu'on séduit avec des promesses.
    • Woman is an overgrown child that one amuses with toys, intoxicates with flattery, and seduces with promises.
    • Sophie Arnould, in Arnoldiana (1813), p. 155
    • Reported in de Finod (1881), pp. 84, 144
  • In his adolescence, he had discussed it with his father while they were weeding a field.
    “About girls,” he had said.
    “What about them?” his father asked.
    “You know.”
    His father sat back on his heels. “Treat her right and she’ll treat you right.”
  •      Their sophistry I can control
    Who falsely say that women have no soul.
  • We women do talk too much; but even then, we don't tell half we know.
 
Everything we see in the world is the creative work of women.
—Atatürk
  • Everything we see in the world is the creative work of women.
    • Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, as reported in Lewis D. Eigen and Jonathan P. Siegel (eds.) The Macmillan Dictionary of Political Quotations (1993), p. 424; also in Yüksel Atillasoy, Ataturk: First President and Founder of the Turkish Republic (2002), p. 15
  • A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.
  • A single woman, with a very narrow income, must be a ridiculous, disagreeable, old maid! the proper sport of boys and girls; but a single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else.
    • Jane Austen, Emma (1815), vol. 1, ch. 10
  • No one can think more highly of the understanding of women than I do. In my opinion, nature has given them so much, that they never find it necessary to use more than half.
  • Women love all whom grief and death attaint.
  •          ... 'tis ordained,
    In death, as sooth in every pinch of life,
    That women, lest they cry too loud, must hug
    Their agony in silence.
    • Alfred Austin, Savonarola (1881), act 4, sc. 4 (Candida)
  • "Nam quae praeda, rogas, quae spes contingere posset,
      iurgia nutricis cum mihi verba darent?"
    Haec sibi dicta putet seque hac sciat arte notari,
      femineam quisquis credidit esse fidem.
    • "What profit could I ever hope to gain
      when hearkening to the prattle of a nurse?"
      Thus often must a worried man complain,
      who, trusting woman, finds her art a curse.
    • Avianus, Fabulae, no. 1 (ed. J. W. Duff, 1934)
    • Jack Lindsay, Song of a Falling World (1948), p. 60
  • But women aren’t like, like...computers or suh'm. You can't just get an access code and then programme 'em to do what you want 'em to. Trust me. About three billion guys've had to learn the same lesson.

B

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  • Women—one half the human race at least—care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry.
  • But woman's grief is like a summer storm,
    Short as it violent is.
    • Joanna Baillie, Count Basil (1798), act 5, sc. 3; in A Series of Plays (1821)
  • He took the rotundity of the moon, and the curves of creepers, and the clinging of tendrils, and the trembling of grass, and the slenderness of the reed, and the bloom of flowers, and the lightness of leaves, and the tapering of the elephant’s trunk, and the glances of deer, and the clustering of rows of bees, and the joyous gaiety of sunbeams, and the weeping of clouds, and the fickleness of the winds, and the timidity of the hare, and the vanity of the peacock, and the softness of the parrot’s bosom, and the hardness of adamant, and the sweetness of honey, and the cruelty of the tiger, and the warm glow of fire, and the coldness of snow, and the chattering of jays, and the cooing of the kókila, and the hypocrisy of the crane, and the fidelity of the chakrawáka; and compounding all these together he made woman, and gave her to man.
  • My ideal of womanhood has always been the pioneer woman who fought and worked at her husband's side. She bore the children, kept the home fires burning; she was the hub of the family, the planner and the dreamer.
  • Les femmes sont toujours vraies, même au milieu de leurs plus grandes faussetés, parce qu’elles cèdent à quelque sentiment naturel.
  • Les hivers sont pour les femmes à la mode ce que fut jadis une campagne pour les militaires de l’empire.
    • The winters are to fashionable women what a campaign once was to the soldiers of the Empire.
    • Honoré de Balzac, La Fausse Maîtresse (1842), ch. 2 (tr. K. P. Wormeley, 1892)
  • Lorsque les femmes nous aiment, elles nous pardonnent tout, même nos crimes; lorsqu'elles ne nous aiment pas, elles ne nous pardonnent rien, pas même nos vertus!
    • When women love, they forgive everything, even our crimes; when they do not love, they cannot forgive anything—not even our virtues.
    • Honoré de Balzac, La Muse du département (1843), pt. 2, ch. 34 (tr. James Waring, 1898)
  • La vertu des femmes est peut-être une question de tempérament.
    • The virtue of women is perhaps a question of temperament.
    • Honoré de Balzac, Physiologie du Mariage (1829), pt. 1, med. 4, aph. 19 (tr. J. W. McSpadden, 1901)
  • Les femmes les plus vertueuses ont en elles quelque chose qui n'est jamais chaste.
    • The most virtuous women have in them something that is never chaste.
    • Honoré de Balzac, Physiologie du Mariage (1829), pt. 1, med. 4, aph. 20 (tr. J. W. McSpadden, 1901)
  • La femme est un délicieux instrument de plaisir, mais il faut en connaitre les frémissantes cordes, en étudier la pose, le clavier timide, le doigté changeant et capricieux.
    • Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.
    • Honoré de Balzac, Physiologie du Mariage (1829), pt. 1, med. 5 (tr. J. W. McSpadden, 1901)
  • Peut-être veulent-elles [les femmes] un peu d'hypocrisie?
    • Women, perhaps, even require a little hypocrisy.
    • Honoré de Balzac, La Peau de chagrin (1831), pt. 2 (tr. Ellen Marriage, 1897)
  • Mes avis sur vos relations avec les femmes sont aussi dans ce mot de chevalerie: Les servir toutes, n'en aimer qu'une.
    • My further advice on your relations to women is based upon that other motto of chivalry, "Serve all, love one."
    • Honoré de Balzac, Le Lys dans la vallée (1835), pt. 2 (tr. K. P. Wormeley, 1891)
  • La sainteté des femmes est inconciliable avec les devoirs et les libertés du monde. Emanciper les femmes, c'est les corrompre.
    • The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.
    • Honoré de Balzac, La Femme de trente ans (1842), ch. 3 (tr. Ellen Marriage, 1897)
  • Les femmes tiennent et doivent toutes tenir à être honorées, car sans l'estime elles n'existent plus. Aussi est-ce le premier sentiment qu'elles demandent à l'amour.
    • Women are tenacious, and all of them should be tenacious of respect; without esteem they cannot exist; esteem is the first demand that they make of love.
    • Honoré de Balzac, La Femme de trente ans (1842), ch. 3 (tr. Ellen Marriage, 1897)
  • La physionomie des femmes ne commence qu'à trente ans.
    • There is no character in women’s faces before the age of thirty.
    • Honoré de Balzac, La Femme de trente ans (1842), ch. 6 (tr. Ellen Marriage, 1897)
  • Les vieilles filles n'ayant pas fait plier leur caractère et leur vie à une autre vie ni à d'autres caractères, comme l'exige la destinée de la femme, ont, pour la plupart, la manie de vouloir tout faire plier autour d'elles.
    • Old maids who have never yielded in their habits of life or in their characters to other lives and other characters, as the fate of woman exacts, have, as a general thing, a mania for making others give way to them.
    • Honoré de Balzac, Le Curé de Tours, ch. 1 (tr. K. P. Wormeley, 1892)
  • Il n’y a que des enfants aimants et aimés qui puissent consoler une femme de la perte de sa beauté.
  • To guard carefully her chastity; to control circumspectly her behavior; in every motion to exhibit modesty; and to model each act on the best usage, this is womanly virtue.
  • O born to soothe distress and lighten care,
    Lively as soft, and innocent as fair!
    Blest with that sweet simplicity of thought
    So rarely found, and never to be taught;
    Of winning speech, endearing, artless, kind,
    The loveliest pattern of a female mind;
    Like some fair spirit from the realms of rest,
    With all her native heaven within her breast;
    So pure, so good, she scarce can guess at sin,
    But thinks the world without like that within;
    Such melting tenderness, so fond to bless,
    Her charity almost become excess.
    Wealth may be courted, Wisdom be revered,
    And Beauty praised, and brutal Strength be fear'd,
    But Goodness only can affection move,
    And love must owe its origin to love.
  • Woman can equal man in loving strength:
    She shall surpass him, when her heart at length
           Quite flowers with fragrance fair.
    The man who brings her all the soul of Art
    Never quite wins her secret silent heart
           Unless his soul is there.
    • George Barlow, "The Sovereign Rose", st. 8. From Dawn to Sunset (1890), bk. 3
  • Not she with trait'rous kiss her Saviour stung,
    Not she denied him with unholy tongue;
    She, while apostles shrank, could danger brave,
    Last at his cross, and earliest at his grave.
  • Charm...it’s a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it, you don’t need to have anything else; and if you don’t have it, it doesn’t much matter what else you have. Some women, the few, have charm for all; and most have charm for one. But some have charm for none.
    • Sir J. M. Barrie, What Every Woman Knows (debuted 1908; pub. 1918), act 1
  • You see, dear, it is not true that woman was made from man's rib; she was really made from his funny bone.
    • Sir J. M. Barrie, What Every Woman Knows (debuted 1908; pub. 1918)
  • Expliquera, morbleu! les femmes qui pourra!
    • Mondor: Explain the women? Zounds! let him who can!
    • Nicolas Thomas Barthe, Les Fausses Infidélités (1768), sc. 17, fin. Œuvres Choisies (Paris, 1811), p. 51. Reported in King (1904), p. 97, no. 742
  • Elle éblouit comme l'Aurore
    Et console comme la Nuit.
  • As the fairest, daintiest natural thing will not brook rough handling or too close and continued examination, the iridescence of the butterfly’s wing, the velvet of the rose petal, so the rare and exquisite essence of womanliness will not bear the heat, the mud, the profanation of the public arena.
  • Then, my good girls, be more than women, wise:
    At least be more than I was; and be sure
    You credit anything the light gives life to
    Before a man.
  • There is a vile, dishonest trick in man,
    More than in women: all the men I meet
    Appear thus to me,—are harsh and rude,
    And have a subtilty in everything,
    Which love could never know; but we, fond women,
    Harbour the easiest and smoothest thoughts,
    And think all shall go so.
    • Beaumont and Fletcher, The Maid's Tragedy (c. 1609; pub. 1619), act 5, sc. 4
  • Woman, they say, was only made of man:
    Methinks ’tis strange they should be so unlike!
    It may be all the best was cut away,
    To make the woman, and the naught was left
    Behind with him.
    • Beaumont and Fletcher, The Coxcomb (c. 1608–10), act 3, sc. 3
  • It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.
    • Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxiéme sexe (1949), vol. 2, pt. 2, ch. 4
    • Tr. H. M. Parshley, The Second Sex (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), p. 64
  • Women who love the same man have a kind of bitter freemasonry.
  • Most women are not so young as they are painted.
    • Sir Max Beerbohm, The Yellow Book (1894), vol. 1, p. 67
  • She’s as inconstant as the seas and winds,
    Which ne’er are calm but to betray adventurers.
  • All soft and sweet the maid appears,
       With looks that know no art,
    And though she yields with trembling fears,
       She yields with all her heart.
  • The soft, unhappy sex.
    • Aphra Behn, The Wandering Beauty (1698), par. 1
  • When the men of Israel bowed in helplessness before Pharaoh, two women spurned his edicts and refused his behests. A father made no effort to save the infant Moses, but a mother's care hid him while concealment was possible, and a sister watched over his preservation when exposed on the river's brink. To woman was intrusted the charge of providing for the perils and the wants of the wilderness; and in the hour of triumph, woman's voice was loudest in the acclaim of joy that ascended to Heaven from an emancipated nation.
  • Cows in India occupy the same position in society as women did in England before they got the vote. Woman was revered but not encouraged. Her life was one long obstacle race owing to the anxiety of man to put pedestals at her feet. While she was falling over the pedestals she was soothingly told that she must occupy a Place Apart—and indeed, so far Apart did her place prove to be that it was practically out of earshot. The cow in India finds her position equally lofty and tiresome. You practically never see a happy cow in India.
  • For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as a necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despise women the most.
  • Absent, adj.
    To men a man is but a mind. Who cares
    What face he carries or what form he wears?
    But woman’s body is the woman.
    O, Stay thou, my sweetheart, and do never go,
    But heed the warning words the sage hath said:
    A woman absent is a woman dead.
    —Jogo Tyree
  • Adamant, n. A mineral frequently found beneath a corset. Soluble in solicitate of gold.
  • Female, n. One of the opposing, or unfair, sex.
  • Garther, n. An elastic band intended to keep a woman from coming out of her stockings and desolating the country.
  • Indiscretion, n. The guilt of woman.
  • Queen, n. A woman by whom the realm is ruled when there is a king, and through whom it is ruled when there is not.
  • Weaknesses, n.pl. Certain primal powers of Tyrant Woman wherewith she holds dominion over the male of her species, binding him to the service of her will and paralyzing his rebellious energies.
  • Witch, n. (1) Any ugly and repulsive old woman, in a wicked league with the devil. (2) A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the devil.
  • Woman, n. An animal usually living in the vicinity of Man, and having a rudimentary susceptibility to domestication. It is credited by many of the elder zoologists with a certain vestigial docility acquired in a former state of seclusion, but naturalists of the postsusananthony period, having no knowledge of the seclusion, deny the virtue and declare that such as creation's dawn beheld, it roareth now. ... The popular name (wolfman) is incorrect, for the creature is of the cat kind. The woman is lithe and graceful in its movement, especially the American variety (felis pugnans), is omnivorous and can be taught not to talk. —Balthasar Pober
    • Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Word Book (1906); republished as The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
  • Oh, Woman! Woman! thou art formed to bless
       The heart of restless Man, to chase his care,
    And charm existence by thy loveliness;
       Bright as the sun-beam, as the morning fair,
    If but thy foot fall on a wilderness,
       Flowers spring, and shed their roseate blossoms there,
    Shrouding the thorns that on thy path-way rise,
    And scattering o'er it hues of Paradise!
    Thy voice of love is music to the ear,
       Soothing and soft, and gentle as the stream
    That strays 'mid summer flowers; thy glittering tear
       Is mutely eloquent; thy smile a beam
    Of light ineffable, so sweet, so dear,
       It wakes the heart from sorrow's darkest dream,
    Shedding a hallowed lustre o'er our fate,
    And when it beams we are not desolate!
  • Why should I be my aunt,
    or me, or anyone?
    What similarities—
    boots, hands, the family voice
    I felt in my throat, or even
    the National Geographic
    and those awful hanging breasts—
    held us all together
    or made us all just one?
    • Elizabeth Bishop, "In the Waiting Room", st. 4; The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (1983)
  • Women who are (beyond all doubt) the mothers of all mischief, also nurse that babe to sleep, when he is too noisy.
  • She it was who first took man to the Tree of Knowledge, and made him know Good and Evil; and, if she had been let alone and allowed to do what she wished, she would have led him to the Tree of Life and thus rendered him immortal.
    • H. P. Blavatsky, "Alchemy in the Nineteenth Century" (tr. Thomas Williams), in Theosophical Siftings, vol. 4 (1892), p. 18
  • Where two women meet, there a market springs; where three congregate, a bazaar is opened; and where seven talk, there begins a fair.
  • The entire being of a woman is a secret, which should be kept. And one more deep secret to her becomes part of it, one charm more, a hidden treasure. It is said that the tree under which a murderer buries his victim will die, but the apple tree under which a girl buries her murdered child does blossom more richly and does give more perfect fruit than others—the tree transforms the hidden crime into white and rosy, and into delicious flavor.
    • Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), "The Cardinal's Third Tale", Last Tales (1957), p. 58
  • Io ho inteso che un gallo basta assai bene a diece galline, ma che diece uomini posson male o con fatica una femina sodisfare.
    • I have always been given to understand...that whereas a single cock is quite sufficient for ten hens, ten men are hard put to satisfy one woman.
    • Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (c. 1348–53), Third Day, First Story (tr. G. H. McWilliam, 1972)
  • Ci cacciano in cucina a dir delle favole colla gatta.
    • They banish us to the kitchen, there to tell stories to the cat.
    • Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (c. 1348–53), Fifth Day, Tenth Story (tr. J. M. Rigg, 1903)
  • It is annoying and impossible to suffer proud women, because in general Nature has given men proud and high spirits, while it has made women humble in character and submissive, more apt for delicate things than for ruling.
  • On the one hand, then, in the reproductive functions proper—menstruation, defloration, pregnancy, and parturition—woman is biologically doomed to suffer. Nature seems to have no hesitation in administering to her strong doses of pain, and she can do nothing but submit passively to the regimen prescribed. On the other hand, as regards sexual attraction, which is necessary for the act of impregnation, and as regards the erotic pleasure experienced during the act itself, the woman may be on equal footing with the man.
    • Marie Bonaparte, "Passivity, Masochism, and Femininity", International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 16, pt. 3 (July 1935), pp. 326–27
    • Based on a paper read before the 13th IPA Congress, Lucerne, August 1934. The original paper was entitled Du masochisme féminin essentiel
  • Belinda and her bird! 'tis rare
    To meet with such a well-match'd pair,—
       The language and the tone,
    Each character in every part
    Sustain'd with so much grace and art,
       And both in unison.
    When children first begin to spell,
    And stammer out a syllable,
       We think them tedious creatures;
    But difficulties soon abate,
    When birds are to be taught to prate,
       And women are the teachers.
  • It is not strange to me, that persons of the fairer sex should like, in all things about them, that handsomeness for which they find themselves most liked.
    • Robert Boyle, Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects (1665), no. 9
  • Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The harmony, not to say identity, of interests and views which belong, or should belong, to the family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband. ... The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfil the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.
  • Phidias made the statue of Venus at Elis with one foot upon the shell of a tortoise, to signify two great duties of a virtuous woman, which are to keep home and be silent.
    • William De Britaine, Human Prudence (ed. 1726), p. 134. Referred to by Burton—Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. 3, sec. 3, mem. 4, subs. 2
  • Women have no wilderness in them,
    They are provident instead,
    Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
    To eat dusty bread.
  • Next to God, we are indebted to women, first for life itself, and then for making it worth having.
 
There's not a place in Earth or Heaven,
There's not a task to mankind given...
That has a feather's weight or worth—
Without a woman in it.
  • They talk about a woman's sphere as though it had a limit;
    There's not a place in Earth or Heaven,
    There's not a task to mankind given,
    There's not a blessing or a woe,
    There's not a whispered yes or no,
    There's not a life, or death, or birth,
    That has a feather's weight or worth—
    Without a woman in it.
    • C. E. Bowman, "The Sphere of Woman", in Joseph M. Chapple, Heart Throbs in Prose and Verse (1905), p. 343. A similar version, author unknown, in Jennie Day Haines, Sovereign Woman Versus Mere Man (1905), p. 50:
      They talk about 'a woman's sphere'
      As though it has a limit;
      There's not a spot on sea or shore,
      In sanctum, office, shop or store,
      Without a woman in it.
  • The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief, should have gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is because women are never lazy. They don't know what it is to be quiet. They are Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joan of Arcs, Queen Elizabeths, and Catharines the Second, and they riot in battle, and murder, and clamour and desperation. If they can't agitate the universe and play at ball with hemispheres, they'll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of domestic molehills, and social storms in household teacups. Forbid them to hold forth upon the freedom of nations and the wrongs of mankind, and they'll quarrel with Mrs. Jones about the shape of a mantle or the character of a small maid-servant. To call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the noisier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex. They want freedom of opinion, variety of occupation, do they? Let them have it. Let them be lawyers, doctors, preachers, teachers, soldiers, legislators—anything they like—but let them be quiet—if they can.
  • I am obnoxious to each carping tongue,
    Who sayes my hand a needle better fits,
    A poet’s pen, all scorne, I should thus wrong;
    For such despight they cast on female wits:
    If what I doe prove well, it won’t advance,
    They’ll say it’s stolne, or else, it was by chance.
  • Let Greeks be Greeks, and women what they are.
    • Anne Bradstreet, "The Prologue", The Tenth Muse (1650)
  • If women I with women may compare,
    Your works are solid, others light as air:
    Some books of women I have heard of late,
    Perused some, so witless, intricate,
    So void of sense and truth, as if to err
    Were only wish'd (acting above their sphere):
    And all to get what (silly souls) they lack,
    Esteem'd to be the wisest of the pack:
    Though (for your sake) to some this be permitted
    To print, yet wish I may be better wilted.
    • Prefixed to Anne Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse (1650), and written by her sister
    • Cf. Cotton Mather (below)
  • Oh, what makes woman lovely! virtue, faith,
    And gentleness in suffering,—an endurance
    Through scorn or trial,—these call beauty forth,
    Give it the stamp celestial, and admit it
    To sisterhood with angels!
    • John Brent, "Woman". Reported in Southgate (1866), p. 17
  • All women born are so perverse
    No man need boast their love possessing.
    If nought seem better, nothing's worse:
    All women born are so perverse.
  • Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer...it is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
  • I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.
    • Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847), ch. 23
  • Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.
  • Maud went to college.
    Sadie stayed at home.
    Sadie scraped life
    With a fine-tooth comb.
  • Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
    My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,
    Are gone from the house.
    My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite
    And night is night.
    • Gwendolyn Brooks, "A Sunset of the City", st. 1; The Bean Eaters (1960)
  • Ah, call not perfidy her fickle choice!
    Ah, find not falsehood in an angel's voice!
    True to one word, and constant to one aim,
    Let man's hard soul be stubborn as his frame;
    But leave sweet woman's form and mind at will
    To bend and vary and be graceful still.
    • Thomas Brown, The Paradise of Coquettes, 2nd ed. (1817), pt. 3
  • The works of women are symbolical.
    We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,
    Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,
    To put on when you’re weary.
  • You forget too much
    That every creature, female as the male,
    Stands single in responsible act and thought,
    As also in birth and death.
    • Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856), bk. 2, l. 472
  •          Most illogical
    Irrational nature of our womanhood,
    That blushes one way, feels another way,
    And prays, perhaps, another!
    • Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856), bk. 2, l. 701
  •        If the day's work is scant,
    Why, call it scant; affect no compromise;
    And, in that we have nobly striven at least,
    Deal with us nobly, women though we be,
    And honour us with truth if not with praise.
    • Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856), bk. 4, l. 78
  •          But I love you, sir:
    And when a woman says she loves a man,
    The man must hear her, though he love her not.
    • Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856), bk. 9, l. ?
  • Women cannot judge for men.
    • Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Bertha in the Lane, st. 16. Poems (1844), vol. 2, p. 196
  • Never was lady on earth more true as woman and wife,
    Larger in judgment and instinct, prouder in manners and life.
  • A worthless woman! mere cold clay
       As all false things are! but so fair,
    She takes the breath of men away
       Who gaze upon her unaware:
    I would not play her larcenous tricks
       To have her looks!
    • Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "Bianca among the Nightingales", st. 12. Last Poems (1862), p. 21
  • True genius, but true woman! dost deny
    Thy woman's nature with a manly scorn,
    And break away the gauds and armlets worn
    By weaker women in captivity?
    Ah, vain denial! that revolted cry
    Is sobb'd in by a woman's voice forlorn!
    Thy woman's hair, my sister, all unshorn,
    Floats back dishevell'd strength in agony,
    Disproving thy man's name! and while before
    The world thou burnest in a poet-fire,
    We see thy woman-heart beat evermore
    Through the large flame. Beat purer, heart, and higher,
    Till God unsex thee on the heavenly shore,
    Where unincarnate spirits purely aspire.
    • Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "To George Sand (A Recognition)"
  • She has laugh'd as softly as if she sigh'd,
       She has counted six, and over,
    Of a purse well fill'd, and a heart well tried,—
       Oh, each a worthy lover!
    They "give her time;" for her soul must slip
       Where the world has set the grooving;
    She will lie to none with her fair red lip,—
       But love seeks truer loving.
  • Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what’s become of all the gold
    Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.
 
He gazed and gazed and gazed and gazed,
Amazed, amazed, amazed, amazed.
—Robert Browning
  • He gazed and gazed and gazed and gazed,
    Amazed, amazed, amazed, amazed.
    • Robert Browning, "Rhyme for a Child Viewing a Naked Venus in a Painting of 'The Judgement of Paris'" (wr. c. 1872; pub. 1925)
  • Womanliness means only motherhood;
    All love begins and ends there.
    • Robert Browning, The Inn Album (1875), sec. 7
  • The woman yonder, there's no use of life
    But just to obtain her! heap earth's woes in one
    And bear them—make a pile of all earth's joys
    And spurn them, as they help or help not this;
    Only, obtain her!
  •          ... the mark
    God sets on woman, signifying so
    She should—shall peradventure—be divine.
  • Les femmes sont extrémes: elles sont meilleures ou pires que les hommes.
    • Women, ever in extremes, are always either better or worse than men.
    • Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères (1688), no. 3 (Des femmes), vol. 1, p. 58. Reported in King (1904), p. 175, no. 1360
  • Les hommes sont cause que les femmes ne s'aiment point.
    • Men are the reason why women do not love each other.
    • Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères (1688), no. 3 (Des femmes), vol. 1, p. 58. Reported in King (1904), p. 176, no. 1364
  • The female's defects—greed, hate, and delusion and other defilements—are greater than the male's.
  • Of all cant in this most canting country, no species is at once more paltry and more dangerous than that which has been made the instrument of decrying female accomplishment. All that execrable twaddle about feminine retirement, and feminine ignorance, which we are doomed so often to hear, has done more towards making women scolds, and flirts, and scandal mongers, than people are well aware of. ... The soul of a woman is as fine an emanation from the Great Fountain of Spirit as that of a man.
 
Women are more powerful than they think.
—Louise Burfitt-Dons
  • Women are more powerful than they think. A mother's warmth is the essence of motivation. If we could liquefy the encouragement, care and compassion we deliver to our children it would surely fill an expanse greater than the Pacific.
  • All the pleasing illusions ... are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of 'light' and 'reason'. ... In this scheme of things, a king is only a man, a queen is only a woman; a woman is only an animal, and not an animal of the highest order. All homage paid to the female sex in general ... is to be regarded as romance and folly.
  • Thy daughters bright thy walks adorn,
    Gay as the gilded summer sky,
    Sweet as the dewy milk-white thorn,
    Dear as the raptured thrill of joy.
  • Auld Nature swears, the lovely dears
    Her noblest work she classes, O:
    Her 'prentice hand she tried on man,
    An' then she made the lasses, O.
  • Their tricks and craft hae put me daft,
    They've ta'en me in, and a' that,
    But clear your decks, and—Here's the sex!
    I like the jads for a' that.
    • Robert Burns, "Jolly Beggars" (wr. 1785; pub. 1799)
  • It is a woman's reason to say I will do such a thing because I will.
  • Women wear the breeches.
    • Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621–51), "Democritus to the Reader"
  • I may not here omit those two main plagues, and common dotages of human kind, wine and women, which have infatuated and besotted myriads of people. They go commonly together.
    • Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621–51), pt. 1, sect. 2, member 3, subsect. 13
  • The souls of women are so small,
    That some believe they've none at all;
    Or if they have, like cripples, still
    They've but one faculty, the will.
    • Samuel Butler, "Miscellaneous Thoughts", Genuine Remains in Prose and Verse (1759), vol. 1, p. 246
  • Believe a woman or an epitaph,
    Or any other thing that's false.
    • Lord Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809)
  • Soft as the memory of buried love,
    Pure as the prayer which childhood wafts above.
    • Lord Byron, The Bride of Abydos (1813), canto 1, st. 6
  • She was his life,
    The ocean to the river of his thoughts,
    Which terminated all.
    • Lord Byron, The Dream (1816), st. 2. "River of his Thought" from Dante, Purgatorio, 13, 88
  • Heart on her lips, and soul within her eyes,
    Soft as her clime, and sunny as her skies.
    • Lord Byron, Beppo (1818), st. 45
  • But—Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,
    Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck'd you all?
    • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1819-24), canto 1, st. 22
  • Her stature tall—I hate a dumpy woman.
    • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1819-24), canto 1, st. 61
  • Sweet is revenge—especially to women.
    • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1819–24) canto 1, st. 124
  • Alas! the love of women! it is known
    To be a lovely and a fearful thing!
    • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1819–24), canto 2, st. 199
  • In her first passion woman loves her lover,
    In all the others all she loves is love.
    • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1819–24), canto 3, st. 3
  • A lady with her daughters or her nieces
    Shine like a guinea and seven-shilling pieces.
    • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1819-24), canto 3, st. 60
  • There is a tide in the affairs of women,
    Which, taken at the flood, leads—God knows where.
    • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1819–24), canto 6, st. 2
  • I love the sex, and sometimes would reverse
    The tyrant's wish, "that mankind only had
    One neck, which he with one fell stroke might pierce;"
    My wish is quite as wide, but not so bad,
    And much more tender on the whole than fierce;
    It being (not now, but only while a lad)
    That womankind had but one rosy mouth,
    To kiss them all at once, from North to South.
    • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1819-24), canto 6, st. 27
  • I've seen your stormy seas and stormy women,
    And pity lovers rather more than seamen.
    • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1819-24), canto 6, st. 53
  • But she was a soft landscape of mild earth,
    Where all was harmony, and calm, and quiet,
    Luxuriant, budding; cheerful without mirth.
    • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1819-24), canto 6, st. 53
  • A lady of a 'certain age', which means
    Certainly aged.
    • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1819-24), canto 6, st. 69
  • What a strange thing is man! and what a stranger
    Is woman! What a whirlwind is her head,
    And what a whirlpool full of depth and danger
    Is all the rest about her.
    • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1819-24), canto 9, st. 64
  • And whether coldness, pride, or virtue dignify
    A woman, so she's good, what does it signify?
    • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1819-24), canto 14, st. 57
  • Still I can’t contradict, what so oft has been said,
    'Though women are angels, yet wedlock's the devil.'
    • Lord Byron, "To Eliza" (1806)

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  • The cruel girls we loved
    Are over forty.
    Their subtle daughters
    Have stolen their beauty;
    And with a blue stare
    Of cool surprise,
    They mock their anxious mothers
    With their mothers' eyes.
  • The world was sad; the garden was a wild;
    And man, the hermit, sigh'd—till woman smiled.
  • I care not for these ladies,
      That must be wooed and prayed;
    Give me kind Amaryllis,
      The wanton country maid.
  • Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow!
      Though thou be black as night,
      And she made all of light,
    Yet follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow!
    • Thomas Campion, A Book of Ayres (1601), no. 4
  • Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet!
    Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet!
    • Thomas Campion, A Book of Ayres (1601), no. 10
  • White Iope, blithe Helen, and the rest.
    • Thomas Campion, A Book of Ayres (1601), no. 20
  • There is a garden in her face
       Where roses and white lilies blow;
    A heavenly paradise is that place,
       Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow:
         There cherries grow which none may buy
         Till "Cherry-ripe" themselves do cry.
    • Thomas Campion, Third & Fourth Bookes of Ayres (1617), bk. 4, no. 7
  •          La mas fina
    Tiene una moneda rara
    Que cuando la dice, es oro,
    Que cuando la llora, es perlas
    Que cuando la escribe, es plata,
    Y es cobre cuando la trueca.
    • The most astute of women
      Has a currency so rare,
      That spoken it is golden:
      Pearls when in tears it falls,
      When written it is silver,
      All to copper turns in change.
    • José de Cañizares, El Dómine Lucas, act 1 — loq. Don Antonio (tr. Harbottle and Hume, 1907)
  • En cosas, mayormente de mujeres,
    Jamas tuvo segura la balanza:
    Allí son mas inciertos los placeres,
    Y está mucho mas cierta la mudanza.
  • In danger, mind you, a woman behind you
    Can turn your blood to fire.
  • La donna è come un libro che, buono o cattivo, deve piacere fin dalla copertina.
  • Las mujeres son el impuesto que pagamos por el placer.
  • Chi non sa che senza le donne sentir non si po contento o satisfazione alcuna in tutta questa nostra vita, la quale senza esse saria rustica e priva d'ogni dolcezza e piú aspera che quella dell'alpestre fiere? Chi non sa che le donne sole levano de' nostri cori tutti li vili e bassi pensieri, gli affanni, le miserie e quelle turbide tristezze che cosí spesso loro sono compagne?
    • Who does not know that without women we can feel no content or satisfaction throughout this life of ours, which but for them would be rude and devoid of all sweetness and more savage than that of wild beasts? Who does not know that women alone banish from our hearts all vile and base thoughts, vexations, miseries, and those turbid melancholies that so often are their fellows?
    • Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1528), bk. 3, ch. 51 (tr. L. E. Opdycke, 1901)
  • Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle
       quam mihi, non si se Iuppiter ipse petat.
    Dicit: sed mulier cupido quod dicit amantī,
       in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua.
    • The woman I love says that there is no one whom she would rather marry than me, not if Jupiter himself were to woo her. Says;—but what a woman says to her ardent lover should be written in wind and running water.
    • Catullus, Carmina, no. 70 (tr. F. W. Cornish, 1912)
  • But for the most part, women are not educated as they should be, I mean those of quality; oft their education is only to dance, sing, and fiddle, to write complimental letters, to read romances, to speak some languages that is not their native...their parents take more care of their feet than their head, more of their words than their reason.
    • Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, CCXI Sociable Letters (1664), p. 50
  • Esa es natural condición de mujeres, desdeñar á quien las quiere, y amar á quien las aborrece.
    • It is the nature of women to disdain those who love them, and to love those who abhor them.
    • Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, pt. 1 (1605), ch. 20 (tr. Harbottle and Hume, 1907)
  • An honest maid and a broken leg are best at home, a woman and a hen are soon lost by gadding, and the girl who’s anxious to see also longs to be seen.
    • Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, pt. 2 (1615), ch. 49 (tr. J. M. Cohen, 1950)
  • The girl slept on, motionless, in that curled-up looseness achieved by some women and all cats.
  • It's so hard for women—even nice women—to realize that their bodies are not irresistible.
  • You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women. Women made me sick.
    • Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939), ch. 25
  • Her hand was small and had shape, not the usual bony garden tool you see on women nowadays.
    • Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939), ch. 28
  • I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.
  • She sighed. "All men are the same."
    "So are all women—after the first nine."
    • Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely (1940), ch. 32
  • Suddenly, without any real change in her, she ceased to be beautiful. She looked merely like a woman who would have been dangerous a hundred years ago, and twenty years ago daring, but who today was just Grade B Hollywood.
    • Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely (1940), ch. 39
  • A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.
  • A cigarette girl came down the gangway. She wore an egret plume in her hair, enough clothes to hide behind a toothpick, one of her long beautiful naked legs was silver, and one was gold. She had the utterly disdainful expression of a dame who makes her dates by long distance.
    • Raymond Chandler, The High Window (1942), ch. 17
  • Maybe you don't like tall girls with honey-colored hair and skin like the first strawberry peach the grocer sneaks out of the box for himself. If you don't, I'm sorry for you.
  • When a woman is a really good driver she is just about perfect.
    • Raymond Chandler, Playback (1957), ch. 12
  • Confusion has seized us, and all things go wrong:
       The women have leaped from "their spheres"
    And instead of fixed stars, shoot as comets along,
       And are setting the world by the ears!
    • Maria Weston Chapman, "The Times That Try Men's Souls", in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda J. Gage (eds.) History of Women's Suffrage, vol. 1 (1881), p. 82
  • Let no man value at a little price
    A virtuous woman's counsel; her wing'd spirit
    Is feather'd oftentimes with heavenly words.
  • Woman is the crowning excellence of God's creation, the shadow of the gods. Man the god's creation only. Woman is light, man is shadow. Could the light do without the shadow?
  • But love a womman that she woot it nought,
    And she wol quyte it that thow shalt nat fele;
    Unknowe, unkist, and lost, that is unsought.
  • Ther seyde ones a clerk in two vers: "what is bettre than gold? Iaspre. What is bettre than Iaspre? Wisdom. / And what is bettre than wisdom? Womman. And what is bettre than a good womman? No-thing."
  • "My lige lady, generally," quod he,
    "Wommen desyren to have sovereyntee
    As wel over hir housbond as hir love."
  • A woman can only become a man’s friend in three stages: first, she’s an agreeable acquaintance, then a mistress, and only after that a friend.
  • The world must keep one great amateur, lest we all become artists and perish. Somebody must renounce all specialist conquests, that she may conquer all the conquerors. That she may be a queen of life, she must not be a private soldier in it.
  • If you convey to a woman that something ought to be done, there is always a dreadful danger that she will suddenly do it.
    • G. K. Chesterton, The Secret of Father Brown (1927), "The Song of the Flying Fish"
  • Of my two "handicaps," being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black.
 
Nuns and married women are unhappy after different manners. —Christina of Sweden
  • Les religieuses et les femmes mariées sont malheureuses de différente manière.
    • Nuns and married women are unhappy after different manners.
    • Christina of Sweden, Maxims (wr. 1660–80), cent. 7, no. 51 (tr. Anonymous, 1753)
  • What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an inevitable penance, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a coveted calamity, a domestic peril, a pleasant harm, the nature of evil painted over with the colours of good: wherefore it is a sin to desert her, but a torment to keep her.
  • We shall find no fiend in hell can match the fury of a disappointed woman,—scorn'd! slighted! dismiss'd without a parting pang.
  • Men that had seen her
    Drank deep and were silent,
    The women were speaking
    Wherever she went,
    As a bell that is rung
    Or a wonder told shyly,
    And O she was the Sunday
    In every week.
  • Woman is the promise that cannot be kept; but it is precisely in this that my mercy consists.
 
Women's rights are human rights. —Hillary Clinton
  • If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, it is that human rights are women's rights — and women's rights are human rights. Let us not forget that among those rights are the right to speak freely — and the right to be heard.
    • Hillary Clinton, Remarks while US First Lady to the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, China (5 September 1995) [3]
  • In too many instances, the march to globalization has also meant the marginalization of women and girls.
    • Hillary Clinton, Remarks in the US Senate (8 March 2005); Congressional Record, 109th Congress, 1st Session, pt. 3, p. 3748, col. 3
  • "Where were you, last night?"
    "I was in bed ... sleeping
    Beside you ...
    Of course!"
    "And I was leaping
    Broomsticks, and burying Jesus,
    And patting Godiva's horse!"
  • If a woman likes another woman, she's cordial. If she doesn't like her, she's very cordial.
 
I can cure your men of walking off the program. Let's put on the girls. —Jacqueline Cochran
  • One day, I got a call to come into General Arnold's office. He said, "What do you know about the B-26?" I said, "I don’t know a thing except the scuttlebutt that it’s a so-called hot airplane." The men were saying that they were willing to be killed in war, but they wouldn't fly the B-26. ... I flew the plane and didn't see any thing so difficult about it. I came back and said to General Arnold, "I can cure your men of walking off the program. Let's put on the girls."
  • A damsel with a dulcimer
    In a vision once I saw:
    It was an Abyssinian maid
    And on her dulcimer she play'd,
    Singing of Mount Abora.
  • I guess, 'twas frightful there to see
    A lady so richly clad as she—
    Beautiful exceedingly!
    • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel, pt. 1 (wr. 1797; pub. 1800), l. 66
  • Her gentle limbs did she undress
    And lay down in her loveliness.
    • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel, pt. 1 (wr. 1797; pub. 1800), l. 237
  • Behold! her bosom and half her side—
    A sight to dream of, not to tell!
    • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel, pt. 1 (wr. 1797; pub. 1800), l. 252
  • Quand elle lève ses paupières, on dirait qu'elle se déshabille.
    • When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off her clothes.
    • Colette, Claudine s'en va (1903), ch. 3 (tr. Antonia White, 1962)
  • The greatest heroes that the world can know,
    To women their original must owe.
    • Mary Collier, The Three Wise Sentences, from the First Book of Esdras (1740), l. 132
  • Of all people, girls and servants are the most difficult to behave to. If you are familiar with them, they lose their humility. If you maintain a reserve towards them, they are discontented.
  • Women are like tricks by slight of hand,
    Which, to admire, we should not understand.
  • It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.
  • It’s nice to meet serious people
    And hear them explain their views:
    Your concern for the rights of women
    Is especially welcome news.
    I’m sure you’d never exploit one;
    I expect you’d rather be dead;
    I’m thoroughly convinced of it—
    Now can we go to bed?
  • Quelle injustice aux dieux d'abandonner aux femmes
    Un empire si grand sur les plus belles ames,
    Et de se plaire à voir de si faibles vainqueurs
    Régner si puissamment sur les plus nobles cœurs!
    • Oh, how unjustly heaven suffers women
      To wield such power o'er the noblest hearts,
      And finds delight in seeing even these
      So 'neath the conquering sway of such weak beings!
    • Pierre Corneille, Horace (1640), act 4 (tr. Lacy Lockert, 1957)
  • Certum est enim, longos esse crines omnibus sed breves sensus mulieribus.
  • Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs.
  • Well thou play'dst the housewife's part,
    And all thy threads with magic art
    Have wound themselves about this heart,
             My Mary.
  • Her air, her manners, all who saw admired;
    Courteous though coy, and gentle, though retired:
    The joy of youth and health her eyes display'd,
    And ease of heart her every look convey'd.
  • Whoe'er she be,
    That not impossible she,
    That shall command my heart and me.
    • Richard Crashaw, "Wishes to his (Supposed) Mistress", in Wit’s Recreations (1641); The Delights of the Muses (1646)
  • the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
    are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds.
    • E. E. Cummings, "Sonnets-Realities", no. 1; Tulips and Chimneys (1923),

D

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  • Women are as inscrutable as the ocean. You never know what you have under your keel, deep water or shallow, until you have heaved the lead.
    • Roald Dahl, "Bitch", in Playboy, vol. 21, no. 7 (July 1974), p. 88; collected in Switch Bitch] (1974), p. 183
  • Quanto in femmina fuoco d'amor dura,
    Se l'occhio o 'l tatto spesso nol raccende.
  • [Women's Liberation] ... is an ontological, spiritual revolution, pointing beyond the idolatries of sexist society and sparking creative action in and toward transcendence. The becoming of women implies universal human becoming. It has everything to do with the search for ultimate meaning and reality which some would call God.
    • Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (1973), p. 6
  • It requires a kick in the imagination, a wrenching of tired words, to realize that feminism is the final and therefore the first cause, and that this movement is movement. Realization of this is already the beginning of a qualitative leap in being. For the philosophers of senescence 'the final cause' is in technical reason; it is the Father's plan, an endless flow of Xerox copies of the past. But the final cause that is movement is in our imaginative-cerebral-emotional-active-creative being.
    • Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (1973), p. 190
  • Puella vero, quia ferrum est quod feminæ observant, magis quam Catonianam gravitatem.
  • Man is more powerful in body and mind than woman, and in the savage state he keeps her in a far more abject state of bondage, than does the male of any other animal; therefore it is not surprising that he should have gained the power of selection. Women are everywhere conscious of the value of their own beauty; and when they have the means, they take more delight in decorating themselves with all sorts of ornaments than do men. They borrow the plumes of male birds, with which nature has decked this sex in order to charm the females.
  • In the Divorce Court women complain of losing weight. Outside the Divorce Court they complain of putting it on.
  • Qui va plus tost que la fumée,
    Si ce n'est la flamme allumée?
    Plus tost que la flamme? le vent:
    Plus tost que le vent? c'est la femme:
    Quoi plus? rien, elle va devant
    Le vent, la fumée et la flamme.
    • Than smoke what swifter can ye name,
      Unless it be the lighted flame?
      What swifter than the flame? The wind.
      Swifter than that? 'Tis womankind.
      What swifter? Nothing; she with ease
      Outstrips alike flame, smoke and breeze.
    • Agrippa d'Aubigné, Sur l'inconstance de la femme, Petites Œuvres mêlées (1630), p. 169 (tr. Harbottle and Dalbiac, 1904)
  • Why then should women be denied the benefits of instruction? If knowledge and understanding had been useless additions to the sex, God almighty would never have given them capacities.
    • Daniel Defoe, An Essay Upon Projects (1697), "Proposal for an Academy for Women"
  • Were there no women, men might live like gods.
  • There's no music when a woman is in the concert.
 
Women never have young minds. They are born three thousand years old. —Shelagh Delaney
  • Women never have young minds. They are born three thousand years old.
  • Now we have courtesans for the sake of pleasure, but concubines for the sake of daily cohabitation, and wives for the purpose of having children legitimately, and of having a faithful guardian of all our household affairs.
  • Now, a woman, she’s a woman. I ’ave fixed that for a cert.
    They’re jist as like as rows uv peas from ’at to ’em uv skirt.
    An’ then, they’re all so different, yeh find, before yeh’ve done,
    The more yeh know uv all uv ’em the less yeh know uv one.
  • Women is strange. You take my tip; I’m wise.
      I know enough to know I'll never know
    The ’uman female mind.
  • Les femmes ont toujours quelque arrière pensée.
  • La Femme, enfant malade et douze fois impur!
    • Woman, sick child and twelve times unclean!
    • Alfred de Vigny, "La Colère de Samson", Les Destinées (1864), p. 88
    • Huntington Cairns (ed.) The Limits of Art (1948), p. 1145
  • But were it to my fancy given
    To rate her charms, I'd call them heaven;
    For though a mortal made of clay,
    Angels must love Ann Hathaway;
    She hath a way so to control,
    To rapture the imprisoned soul,
    And sweetest heaven on earth display,
    That to be heaven Ann hath a way;
    She hath a way,
    Ann Hathaway,—
    To be heaven's self Ann hath a way.
  • But in some odd nook in Mrs. Todgers's breast, up a great many steps, and in a corner easy to be overlooked, there was a secret door, with "Woman" written on the spring, which, at a touch from Mercy's hand, had flown wide open, and admitted her for shelter.
  • A good uniform must work its way with the women, sooner or later.
  • What Soft — Cherubic Creatures —
    These Gentlewomen are —
    One would as soon assault a Plush —
    Or violate a Star —
    Such Dimity Convictions —
    A Horror so refined
    Of freckled Human Nature —
    Of Deity — ashamed.
  • Ἡ τὰ ῥόδα, ῥοδόεσσαν ἔχεις χάριν ἀλλὰ τί πωλεῖς;
    σαυτήν, ἢ τὰ ῥόδα; ἠὲ συναμφότερα.
  • It is only the women whose eyes have been washed clear with tears who get the broad vision that makes them little sisters to all the world.
  • The ladies of St. James's!
       They're painted to the eyes;
    Their white it stays forever
       Their red it never dies:
    But Phillida, my Phillida!
       Her colour comes and goes;
    It trembles to a lily,—
       It wavers to a rose.
  • Be then thine own home, and in thyself dwell;
    Inn anywhere;
    And seeing the snail, which everywhere doth roam,
    Carrying his own home still, still is at home,
    Follow (for he is easy-paced) this snail:
    Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail.
    • John Donne, "To Sir Henry Wootton"; Henry Alford (ed.) Works, vol. 6 (1839), p. 455
  • Licence my roving hands, and let them go,
    Behind, before, above, between, below.
    O, my America, my New-found-land,
    My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann'd.
    • John Donne, "To his Mistress Going to Bed"; The Harmony of the Muses (1654); Poems (1669)
  • A woman is incapable of complete remorse
    • Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Possessed (1871–72), pt. 2, ch. 10 (tr. Constance Garnett, 1913)
  • A woman is always a woman even if she is a nun.
    • Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Possessed (1871–72), pt. 3, ch. 7 (tr. Constance Garnett, 1913)
  • Man, the infatuated idealist, always on the look-out for something to adore, created, in one of his moments of mediæval vapours, the Madonna-woman. It was a benignantly grinning idol, inanely oracular, to be approached on bended knees. In those days, women had to acquiesce in all his unhealthy whimsies, and many of them began to take the thing seriously and to play his game. Now, they mean to have no more of it; they are sick, utterly sick, of the Madonna business. They mean to laugh again and to enjoy life like other beasts of the earth: like men, in fact. Whenever, therefore, you catch yourself thinking that women are saints and angels, be sure you take a blue pill.
  • In an experience of women that extends over many nations and three separate continents, I have never looked upon a face which gave a clearer promise of a refined and sensitive nature.
  • To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.
  • Cherchez la femme.
    • Find the woman.
    • Alexandre Dumas père, Les Mohicans de Paris (1854), vol. 3, ch. 10, and elsewhere in the novel; act 3, sc. 7, of the 1864 play. Reported in King (1904), p. 43, no. 317
  • La femme est, selon la Bible, la dernière chose que Dieu a faite. Il a dû la faire le samedi soir. On sent la fatigue.
  • And, like another Helen, fir'd another Troy.
  • For women with a mischief to their kind,
    Pervert with bad advice our better mind.
  • A woman's counsel brought us first to woe,
    And made her man his paradise forego,
    Where at heart's ease he liv'd; and might have been
    As free from sorrow as he was from sin.
  • And that one hunting, which the devil design'd
    For one fair female, lost him half the kind.
  • She hugg'd the offender, and forgave the offence;
    Sex to the last.
  • I am resolved to grow fat and look young till forty, and then slip out of the world with the first wrinkle and the reputation of five and twenty.
  • Six hours like this for a few francs.
    Belly nipple arse in the window light,
    he drains the colour from me. Further to the right,
    Madame. And do try to be still.
    I shall be represented analytically and hung
    in great museums. The bourgeoisie will coo
    at such an image of a river-whore. They call it Art.

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  • And I find more bitter than death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands as bands: who so pleaseth God shall escape from her; but the sinner shall be taken by her. Behold, this have I found, saith the preacher, counting one by one, to find out the account Which yet my soul seeketh, but I find not: one man among a thousand have I found; but a woman among all those have I not found.
  • Art thou so deeply read in nature and her large philosophy, and I am yet to teach thee that deadliest hellebore or the vomit of a toad are qualified poison to the malice of a woman?
  • From the first dawn of life unto the grave,
    Poor Womankind's in every state a slave.
  • We will our rights in learning's world maintain;
    Wit's Empire now shall know a female reign.
    • Sarah Egerton, The Emulation (1703), l. 32
  • Half the sorrows of women would be averted if they could repress the speech they know to be useless; nay, the speech they have resolved not to make.
  • Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science.
    • George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–2), bk. 1, ch. 11
  • The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
    • George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860), bk. 6, ch. 3
  • I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.
    • George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860), bk. 6, ch. 6
  • In the room the women come and go
    Talking of Michelangelo.
    • T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917)
  • The sleek Brazilian jaguar
    Does not in its arboreal gloom
    Distil so rank a feline smell
    As Grishkin in a drawing-room.
  • When lovely woman stoops to folly and
    Paces about her room again, alone,
    She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
    And puts a record on the gramophone.
 
I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king. —Elizabeth I
  • I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too; and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm.
  • We women were allowed to stand at the Cross. We saw His wounds bleed and His eyes grow dim. As He was dying Jesus put His faith in us, we were to carry His love through the whole world and here we sit and have forgotten Him.
  • "I hear today's college women are 'prodigious.'"
    "Prodigious? Is that what you heard?"
    "Well, I read it in a magazine. It was something I wanted to believe."
    "The Jayster. Always a dreamer."
  • A woman is like a tea bag. You don't know its strength until it's in hot water.
  • When greater perils men environ,
    Then women show a front of iron;
    And, gentle in their manner, they
    Do bold things in a quiet way.
  • What greater thing do they wish in their whole lives than that they may please the man? For to what other purpose are all those dresses, washes, baths, slops, perfumes, and those several little tricks of setting their faces, painting their eyebrows, and smoothing their skins? And now tell me, what higher letters of recommendation have they to men than this folly?
  • Books destroy women's brains, who have little enough of themselves. ... I have often heard it said that a wise woman is twice a fool.
  • Παυρολόγοι πολιαί, ταὶ γήραος ἄνθεα θνατοῖς.
    • Soft-voiced white-haired women, like old age's blossoms...
    • Erinna, fragment of the Distaff, tr. C. M. Bowra, OBGVT (1938), p. 522
 
There is no worse evil than a bad woman; and nothing has ever been produced better than a good one. —Euripides
  • Σοφὴν δὲ μισῶ· μὴ γὰρ ἔν γ' ἐμοῖς δόμοις
    Εἴη φρονοῦσα πλεῖον ἢ γυναῖκα χρή.
    • I hate a clever woman. I would have no woman in my house that knows more than a woman should.
    • Euripides, Hippolytus, l. 640. Reported in King (1904), p. 331, no. 2596
  • Γυνὴ δὲ θῆλυ κἀπὶ δακρύοις ἔφυ.
  • There is no worse evil than a bad woman; and nothing has ever been produced better than a good one.
    • Euripides, fragment of Melanippe. Reported in Hoyt's (1922), p. 889
  • When a woman behaves like a man, why doesn't she behave like a nice man?

F

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What does a woman want?
—Sigmund Freud
  • Charming women can true converts make,
    We love the precepts for the teacher’s sake.
  • A woman can look both moral and exciting—if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle.
    • Edna Ferber, in Reader's Digest, vol. 66 (January 1955), p. 38
  • Oh, woman, perfect woman! what distraction
    Was meant to mankind when thou wast made a devil!
    What an inviting hell invented.
    • John Fletcher, The Comedy of Monsieur Thomas (c. 1610–16; pub. 1639), act 3, sc. 1
  • A woman friend! He that believes that weakness,
    Steers in a stormy night without a compass.
  • Did I my lines intend for public view,
    How many censures would their faults persue; ...
    True judges might condemn their want of wit,
    And all might say, they’re by a woman writ.
  • Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,
    Such an intruder on the rights of men,
    Such a presumptuous creature, is esteem'd,
    The fault, can by no virtue be redeem'd.
  • Women and love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture.
  • Mrs Browning's death is rather a relief to me, I must say: no more Aurora Leighs, thank God! A woman of real genius, I know; but what is the upshot of it all? She and her sex had better mind the kitchen and their children; and perhaps the poor: except in such things as little novels, they only devote themselves to what men do much better, leaving that which men do worse or not at all.
  • The [ten] properties of a woman. The fyrst is, to be mery of chere; the seconde, to be well paced; the thyrde, to have a brode foreheed; the fourth, to have brode buttockes; the fyfthe, to be harde of warde; the syxte, to be easye to lepe uppon; the [seventh], to be good at a longe journeye; the [eighth], to be well sturrynge under a man; the [ninth], to be alwaye besye with the mouthe; the tenth, ever to be chowynge on the brydell.
  • Un homme au moins est libre; il peut parcourir les passions et les pays, traverser les obstacles, mordre aux bonheurs les plus lointains. Mais une femme est empêchée continuellement. Inerte et flexible à la fois, elle a contre elle les mollesses de la chair avec les dépendances de la loi. Sa volonté, comme le voile de son chapeau retenu par un cordon, palpite à tous les vents; il y a toujours quelque désir qui entraîne, quelque convenance qui retient.
    • A man, at least, is free; he can explore each passion and every kingdom, conquer obstacles, feast upon the most exotic pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted. Both inert and yielding, against her are ranged the weakness of the flesh and the inequity of the law. Her will, like the veil strung to her bonnet, flutters in every breeze; always there is the desire urging, always the convention restraining.
    • Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857), pt. 2, ch. 3 (tr. Geoffrey Wall, 1992)
  • Mulier intra pectus omnis celat virus pestilens;
    dulce de labris loquuntur, corde vivunt noxio.
    • Every woman in her bosom hides a poisonous pestilence:
      Though the lips speak ne'er so sweetly, yet the heart contrives offence.
    • Publius Annius Florus, De Qualitate Vitae, frag. 3 (tr. J. W. and A. M. Duff, 1934)
  • Woman, I tell you, is a microcosm; and rightly to rule her, requires as great talents as to govern a state.
  • I grudged her nothing except my company. But it has gone further, like the degradation of rural England: this afternoon (Sunday in Aprril) all the young men had women with them in far-flung cameradeie. If women ever wanted to be by themselves all would be well. But I don't believe they ever want to be, except for reasons of advertisement, and their instinct is never to let men be by themselves. This, I begin to see, is sex-war, and D.H.L. has seen it, in spite of a durable marriage, and is far more on the facts than Bernard Shaw and his Life Force.
    • E. M. Forster, Commonplace Book, ed. Philip Gardner (Stanford UP, 1985), p. 59
  • One can run away from women, turn them out, or give in to them. No fourth course.
  • The extension of women's rights is the basic principle of all social progress.
    • Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements and of the General Destinies (1808)
  • (Que) en mujeres y empanadas
    Del figon, hay mucho hueso.
    • For in women and in cookshop pasties there is a great deal of bone.
    • Juan de Matos Fragoso, La Dicha por el Desprecio, act 1 — loq. Sancho (tr. Harbottle and Hume, 1907)
  • Toute femme varie
    Bien fol est qui s'y fie.
    • Woman is always fickle—foolish is he who trusts her.
    • François I; scratched with his ring on a window of Chambord Castle. (Quoted also "souvent femme.") See Brantome—Œuvres, vol. 7, p. 395. Also Le Roux de Lincy, Le Livre des Proverbes François, vol. 1 (ed. 1859), pt. 5, p. 231. Reported in Hoyt's (1922), p. 889
  • I am about courting a girl I have had but little acquaintance with. How shall I come to a knowledge of her faults, and whether she has the virtues I imagine she has?
       Answer. Commend her among her female acquaintance.
    • Benjamin Franklin, in the Pennsylvania Gazette (12 March 1732)
    • Jared Sparks (ed.) The Works of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 2 (Chicago, 1882), p. 550 [4]
  • The great question ... which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'
    • Sigmund Freud, letter to Marie Bonaparte, quoted in Sigmund Freud, Life and Work, ed. Ernest Jones (Hogarth Press, 1953)
  • The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban housewife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — "Is this all?"
  • The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.
    • Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963), ch. 13
  • The problem that has no name—which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities.
    • Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963), ch. 14
  • Dignity and self-assurance are everything to a woman, especially a naked one.
  • How sad it is to be a woman!
    Nothing on earth is held so cheap.
  • A cat has nine lives and a woman has nine cats' lives.

G

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To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man's injustice to woman.
—Mahatma Gandhi
  • I'm glad I’m a woman. As Grandpa used to say, "Always be satisfied with your own sex, or you'll never be satisfied with anyone else's."
    • Eva Gabor, Orchids and Salami (London: W. H. Allen, 1954), p. 32
  • Veteres ... voluerunt feminas, etsi perfectae aetatis sint, propter animi levitatem in tutela esse.
    • Our ancestors have seen fit that females, by reason of levity in disposition, should remain in guardianship even when they have attained their majority.
    • Gaius, Institutes, bk. 1, 144–5 (tr. E. H. Warmington, 1938)
  • To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man's injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then, indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man's superior. Has she not greater intuition, is she not more self-sacrificing, has she not greater powers of endurance, has she not greater courage? Without her, man could not be. If nonviolence is the law of our being, the future is with woman. Who can make a more effective appeal to the heart than woman?
 
It takes very little to bring about a woman’s fall, but you have to lift a whole world in order to lift her.
—Paul Gauguin
  • Thanks to our cinctures and corsets we have succeeded in making an artificial being out of woman. She is an anomaly, and Nature herself, obedient to the laws of heredity, aids us in complicating and enervating her. We carefully keep her in a state of nervous weakness and muscular inferiority, and in guarding her from fatigue, we take away from her possibilities of development. Thus modeled on a bizarre ideal of slenderness to which, strangely enough, we continue to adhere, our women have nothing in common with us, and this, perhaps, may not be without grave moral and social disadvantages.
    • Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa (1901), p. 86 (tr. O. F. Theis, 1919), p. 46
  • It takes very little to bring about a woman’s fall, but you have to lift a whole world in order to lift her.
  • And when a lady's in the case,
    You know all other things give place.
    • John Gay, Fables (1727), "The Hare and Many Friends", l. 41
  • 'Tis a woman that seduces all mankind;
    By her we first were taught the wheedling arts.
    • John Gay, The Beggar's Opera (1728), act 1, sc. 1
  • Fill ev’ry glass, for wine inspires us,
    And fires us
    With courage, love and joy.
    Women and wine should life employ.
    Is there ought else on earth desirous?
    • John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (1728), act 2, sc. 1, air 19
  • How happy could I be with either,
    Were t'other dear charmer away!
    But, while ye thus tease me together,
    To neither a word will I say.
    • John Gay, The Beggar's Opera (1728), act 2, sc. 2
  • I must have women. There is nothing unbends the mind like them.
    • John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (1728), act 2, sc. 3
  • To cheat a man is nothing; but the woman must have fine parts indeed who cheats a woman!
    • John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (1728), act 2, sc. 4
  • If the heart of a man is depressed with cares,
    The mist is dispell'd when a woman appears.
    • John Gay, The Beggar's Opera (1728), act 2
  • And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.
  • And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.
  • And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
  • Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
  • Now Abraham and Sarah were old and well stricken in age; and it ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.
  • Es ist doch den Mädchen wie angeboren, dass sie allem gefallen wollen, was nur Augen hat.
    • The desire to please everything having eyes seems inborn in maidens.
    • Salomon Gessner, Evander und Alcima, act 3, sc. 1. Reported in Hoyt's (1922), p. 889
  • A true reckoning with structural disparities in the entertainment industry will demand ... acknowledging that women’s voices and women’s stories are not only worth believing, but also worth hearing. At every level.
  • I am a woman—therefore I may not
    Call to him, cry to him,
    Fly to him,
    Bid him delay not!
  • There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.
  • The fact that women in the home have shut themselves away from the thought and life of the world has done much to retard progress. We fill the world with the children of 20th century A.D. fathers and 20th century B.C. mothers.
    • Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Speech at the National American Convention (1905), in Ida Husted Harper, The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 5 (1922), p. 149
  • I span and Eve span,
    A thread to bind the heart of man!
  • Woman covers her hair in token of Eve's having brought sin into the world; she tries to hide her shame; and women precede men in a funeral cortege, because it was woman who brought death into the world. ... Adam was the heave offering of the world, and Eve defiled it. As expiation, all women are commanded to separate a heave offering from the dough. And because woman extinguished the light of man's soul, she is bidden to kindle the Sabbath light.
  • The Woman in us, still prosecutes a deceit, like that begun in the Garden: and our Understandings are wedded to an Eve, as fatal as the Mother of our miseries.
  • Eine Mutter, die ihren Kindern nicht alles: Freund, Lehrer, Vertraute, Quell der Freude und des gefestigten Stolzes, Ansporn, Dämpfer, Ankläger, Versöhner, Richter und Vergeber ist, die Mutter hat offenbar ihren Beruf verfehlt.
 
The eternal feminine doth draw us upward. —Goethe
  • Denn geht es zu des Bösen Haus
    Das Weib hat tausend Schritt voraus.
    • When toward the Devil's House we tread,
      Woman's a thousand steps ahead.
    • Goethe, Faust, pt. 1: Walpurgisnacht (tr. Bayard Taylor, 1870)
  • 'Tis Lilith.
    Who?
    Adam's first wife is she.
    Beware the lure within her lovely tresses,
    The splendid sole adornment of her hair;
    When she succeeds therewith a youth to snare,
    Not soon again she frees him from her jesses.
    • Goethe, Faust, pt. 1: Walpurgisnacht (tr. Bayard Taylor, 1870)
  • Denn das Naturell der Frauen
    Ist so nah mit Kunst verwandt.
    • For the nature of women is closely allied to art.
    • Goethe, Faust, pt. 2, act 1. Reported in Hoyt's (1922), p. 889
  • Nur der verdient die Gunst der Frauen,
    Der kräftigst sie zu schützen weiss.
    • He only wins a woman's favour
      Who with strong arm in need can save her.
    • Goethe, Faust, pt. 2, act 3: Vor dem Palaste. Reported in King (1904), p. 236, no. 1839
  • Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan.
    • The eternal feminine doth draw us upward.
    • Goethe, Faust, pt. 2: Chorus Mysticus. Reported in Hoyt's (1922), p. 889
  • Ein edler Mann wird durch ein gutes Wort
    Der Frauen weit geführt.
    • A noble man is led far by woman's gentle words.
    • Goethe, Iphigenia auf Tauris (1786), act 1, sc. 2, l. 162. Reported in Hoyt's (1922), p. 889
  • Der Umgang mit Frauen ist das Element guter Sitten.
    • The society of women is the foundation of good manners.
    • Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809), pt. 2, ch. 5. Reported in Hoyt's (1922), p. 889
  • Stupidity is a great asset in a pretty wife. At any rate I have known many husbands who go into raptures about the stupidity of their wives and see in them all the attributes of childlike innocence. Beauty performs veritable miracles. In a beautiful woman all mental defects, instead of provoking revulsion, somehow become extraordinarily alluring; in such creatures vice itself strikes us as comely and harmless; but if she lacks beauty a woman must be fully twenty times as clever as a man in order to command at least respect, if not love.
  • When lovely woman stoops to folly,
      And finds too late that men betray,
    What charm can soothe her melancholy?
      What art can wash her guilt away?
    The only art her guilt to cover,
      To hide her shame from every eye,
    To give repentance to her lover,
      And wring his bosom—is to die.
  • As you are woman, so be lovely:
    As you are lovely, so be various,
    Merciful as constant, constant as various.
    So be mine, as I yours for ever.
    • Robert Graves, "Pygmalion to Galatea", st. 6; Poems, 1914–26 (1927), p. 203
  • What female heart can gold despise?
       What cat's averse to fish?
    • Thomas Gray, "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes", st. 4. Dodsley's Collection, vol. 2 (1748), p. 275
  • The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine. She is the sexual object sought by all men, and all women. She is of neither sex for she herself has no sex at all. Her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others. All she must contribute is her existence. She need achieve nothing, for she is the reward of achievement. She need never give positive evidence of her moral character because virtue is assumed from her loveliness, and her passivity.
  • Women have been charged with deviousness and duplicity since the dawn of civilization so they have never been able to pretend that their masks were anything but masks. It is a slender case but perhaps it does mean that women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.
  • A faire woman is a paradise to the eye, a purgatorye to the purse, and a hell to the soule.
  • You know what women are like? They’re like those long, skinny blocks you get in Tetris, the ones made out of four blocks straight in a row. First when you need them you can’t get any, then when you don’t need them anymore they’re fucking everywhere and you don’t know what to do with them.
  • Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.
  • Las mujeres menosprecian lo que les dan, y mueren por lo que les niegan.
    • Women undervalue what is given to them, and die for what is denied them.
    • Antonio de Guevara, Marco Aurelio y Faustina, ch. 1 (tr. Harbottle and Hume, 1907)
  • Les hommes font les lois.    Les femmes font les mœurs.

H

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She moves a goddess, and she looks a queen. —Homer
  • Coerced innocence is like an imprisoned lark, open the door and it's off for ever. The bird that roams through the sky and the grove unrestrained, knows how to dodge the hawk and protect itself, but the caged one, the moment it leaves its bars and bolts behind, is pounced upon by the fowler or the vulture.
  • Every Woman is in the wrong until she cries—and then she is in the right instantly.
    • In Punch, no. 716 (31 March 1855), p. 128. Attributed to Haliburton in Ballou (1882), p. 214, no. 1829
  • The love of ornament creeps slowly, but surely, into the female heart; the girl who twines the lily in her tresses, and looks at herself in the clear stream, will soon wish that the lily was fadeless, and the stream a mirror.
  • The situation of females without fortune in this country is indeed deeply affecting. Excluded from all the active employments, in which they might engage with the utmost propriety, by men, who to the injury of one sex, add the disgrace of making the other effeminate and ridiculous, an indegent female, the object probably of love and tenderness in her youth, at a more advanced age, a withered flower! has nothing to do but to retire and die.
  • I'm a girl, and by me that’s only great!
    I am proud that my silhouette is curvy,
    That I walk with a sweet and girlish gait
    With my hips kind of swivelly and swervy.
    * * * * *
    I'm strictly a female female
    And my future I hope will be
    In the home of a brave and free male
    Who'll enjoy being a guy having a girl like me.
  • Men have thought me beautiful and I have played with them. Women are like that. Men have loved me, and doing what I liked with them, I have found men contemptible. And then comes this little fat detective whose name I don't know, and he acts as if i were a hag—an old squaw. Can I help then being piqued into some sort of feeling for him? Women are like that.
  • You're a damned good man, sister.
  • She was a big-boned, full-fleshed, red-haired woman of perhaps twenty-eight, handsome in a rather brutal, sloppy way.
  • Most people—even women—get discouraged after you've caught them in the third or fourth straight lie and fall back on either the truth or silence, but not Mimi. She keeps trying and you've got to be careful or you'll find yourself believing her, not because she seems to be telling the truth, but simply because you're tired of disbelieving her.
    • Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man (1934), ch. 25
  • Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.
  • It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
  • To dwell on a heath without studying its meanings was like wedding a foreigner without learning his tongue. The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapours. An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy woman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine.
  • How bewitched I was! How could there be any good in a woman that everybody spoke ill of?
    • Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (1878), bk. 5, ch. 3
  • De wimmin, dey does de talkin' en de flyin', en de mens, dey does de walkin en de pryin', en betwixt en betweenst um, dey ain't much dat don't come out.
  • Woman is a species of which every woman is a variety.
  • All women are rivals.
  • A woman can say more in a sigh than a man can say in a sermon.
  • It often gives a lady a pleasure to give her lover a pang.
  • More women are wooed for their complexions than for their characters.
  • I know this woman. We all do—the type anyway. You see them in the huge new Prada store in Milan, queuing outside the clubs in Soho, sipping skinny lattes in the hot cafés on the Avenue Montaigne—young women who mistake People magazine for news and a Japanese symbol on their backs as a sign of rebellion.
  • We have a bunch of women there who are really something. ... There's one of them wears her breasts like I would wear the Iron Cross.
  • That the woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be loved.
    • Matthew Henry, Note on Genesis 2:21,22. An Exposition of the Five Books of Moses, 3rd ed., vol. 1 (1725), p. 11, with the variant reading 'beloved' for 'loved'. Also in Chaucer, "Persones Tale"
  • Women have a wonderful sense of right and wrong, but little sense of right and left.
  • Women are not much, but they are the best other sex we have.
    • Don Herold, "Epigrams—and Golf", Judge, vol. 88 (27 June 1925), p. 28
  • I will give men as the price for fire an evil thing in which they may all be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction.
  • And he called this woman Pandora, because all they who dwelt on Olympus gave each a gift, a plague to men who eat bread.
    • Hesiod, Works and Days, ll. 80–82 (tr. H. G. Evelyn-White, 1914)
  • Μὴ δὲ γυνή σε νόον πυγοστόλος ἐξαπατάτω
    αἱμύλα κωτίλλουσα, τεὴν διφῶσα καλιήν.
    ὃς δὲ γυναικὶ πέποιθε, πέποιθ᾽ ὅ γε φηλήτῃσιν.
    • Do not let a flaunting woman coax and cozen and deceive you: she is after your barn. The man who trusts womankind trusts deceivers.
    • Hesiod, Works and Days, ll. 373–75 (tr. H. G. Evelyn-White, 1914)
  • If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred.
  • First, then, a woman will, or won't,—depend on't;
    If she will do't, she will; and there's an end on't.
    But, if she won't, since safe and sound your trust is,
    Fear is affront: and jealousy injustice.
  • She most attracts who longest can refuse.
    • Aaron Hill, "Advice to the Virgins, to guard against Flattery"; Works, vol. 3 (2nd ed., 1754), p. 152
  • When a woman goes to a good deal of trouble to make herself look nice, it's often because she gets a secret pleasure out of annoying another member of her sex. One thing woman can do that we men can't is to kiss a woman friend and at the same time stick a needle into her. It's quite hopeless to want to reform women in this respect. Better ignore these little failings! If it makes them happy, well and good. It's an infinitely preferable occupation for a woman than dabbling in metaphysics!
  • Thân em vừa trắng lại vừa tròn,
    Bảy nổi ba chìm với nước non.
    Rắn nát mặc dầu tay kẻ nặn.
    Mà em vẫn giữ tấm lòng son.
    • My body is white; my fate, softly rounded,
      rising and sinking like mountains in streams.
      Whatever way hands may shape me,
      at center my heart is red and true.
    • Hồ Xuân Hương, "The Floating Cake" (tr. John Balaban, 2000)
  • A woman cannot be a pastor by the law of God. I say more, it is against the law of the realm.
  • Women may be whole oceans deeper than we are, but they are also a whole paradise better. She may have got us out of Eden, but as a compensation she makes the earth very pleasant.
  •          He selom errs,
    Who thinks the worst he can of womankind.
  • She moves a goddess, and she looks a queen.
    • Homer, Iliad, bk. 3, l. 208 (tr. Pope, 1715–20)
  • O woman, woman, when to ill thy mind
    Is bent, all hell contains no fouler fiend.
    • Homer, Odyssey, bk. 11, l. 531 (tr. Pope, 1725–6)
  •    What mighty woes
    To thy imperial race from woman rose.
    • Homer, Odyssey, bk. 11, l. 541 (tr. Pope, 1725–6)
  • But, alas! alas! for the woman's fate,
    Who has from a mob to choose a mate!
    'Tis a strange and painful mystery!
    But the more the eggs the worse the hatch;
    The more the fish, the worse the catch;
    The more the sparks the worse the match;
    Is a fact in woman's history.
    • Thomas Hood, "Miss Killmansegg and Her Precious Leg", Poems, 5th ed. (1852), p. 145
  • This so eminent industry in making proselytes more of that sex than of the other, groweth: for that they are deemed apter to serve as instruments and helps in the cause. Apter they are through the eagerness of their affections, that maketh them which way soever they take, diligent in drawing their husbands, children, servants, friends and allies the same way; apter through that natural inclination unto pity, which breedeth in them a greater readiness than in men, to be bountiful towards their preachers who suffer want; apter through sundry opportunities which they especially have, to procure encouragements for their brethren; finally, apter through a singular delight which they take in giving very large and particular intelligence, how all near about them stand affected as concerning the same cause.
  • Darwin's daughters have no tails,
    Yet a reminiscent motion
    Agitates the lovely frails
    At the seat of amputation.
  • A woman without mettle is like a scabbard without a sword.
  • Women are the carriers of society’s values ... men are deviant in the sense that many of the qualities admired in them are also one’s that society has to regard with disapproval ... Women’s Lib portrays society and morality as a male invention to coerce and punish women ... [yet] women are a virtuous group seeking to impose their moral standards on men.
  • If you quest after justice, young women are the wrong continent to explore. They run more to clemency or spite.
  • Woman's intuition is the result of millions of years of not thinking.
  • God in his harmony has equal ends
    For cedar that resists and reed that bends;
    For good it is a woman sometimes rules,
    Holds in her hand the power, and manners, schools
    And laws, and mind; succeeding master proud.
    With gentle voice and smiles she leads the crowd,
    The somber human troop.
  • A woman still has to be twice as good as a man in order to get half as far.
    • Fannie Hurst, at the National Conference of Women sponsored by The New York Times (1943); reported in Beth Blair, "Women Will Have New World Status", Miami Daily News (27 April 1943), p. 11a, col. 5 [6]
  • Brought up in an epoch when ladies apparently rolled along on wheels, Mr. Quarles was peculiarly susceptible to calves.
  • Women will find their place, and it will neither be that in which they have been held, nor that to which some of them aspire. Nature’s old salique law will not be repealed, and no change of dynasty will be effected.
  • Ici, elle était vraiment fille; elle obéissait à son tempérament de femme ardente et cruelle; elle vivait, plus raffinée et plus sauvage, plus exécrable et plus exquise; elle réveillait plus énergiquement les sens en léthargie de l’homme, ensorcelait, domptait plus sûrement ses volontés, avec son charme de grande fleur vénérienne, poussée dans des couches sacrilèges, élevée dans des serres impies.
    • Here she was a true harlot, obedient to her passionate and cruel female temperament; here she came to life, more refined yet more savage, more hateful yet more exquisite than before; here she roused the sleeping senses of the male more powerfully, subjugated his will more surely with her charms — the charms of a great venereal flower, grown in a bed of sacrilege, reared in a hot-house of impiety.
    • Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours (1884), ch. 5 (tr. Robert Baldick, 1959)

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  • O woman! thou wert fashioned to beguile:
    So have all sages said, all poets sung.
    • Jean Ingelow, "The Four Bridges", st. 68, Poems (1863), p. 272
  • A female mind like a rude fallow lies;
    No seed is sown, but weeds spontaneous rise.
    As well might we expect, in winter, spring,
    As land untilled a fruitful crop should bring.
  • A woman’s whole life is a history of the affections. The heart is her world; it is there her ambition strives for empire; it is there her avarice seeks for hidden treasures. She sends forth her sympathies on adventure; she embarks her whole soul in the traffick of affection; and if shipwrecked, her case is hopeless — for it is a bankruptcy of the heart.
    • Washington Irving, "The Broken Heart", in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., no. 1 (1819), pp. 142–3
  • I profess not to know how women's hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration.
  • A woman is more considerate in affairs of love than man; because love is more the study and business of her life.
  • In that day seven women shall take hold of one man.

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  • To make women learned, and foxes tame, hath the same operation, which teacheth them to steale more cuningly, but the possibility is not equall, for when it doth one good, it doth twenty harme.
    • Attributed to James I of England; reported in Thomas Overbury, Edward Francis Rimbault, The Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse of Sir Thomas Overbury (1856), p. 261
  • It cam' wi' a lass, it will gang wi' a lass.
    • The crown came with a woman, and it will go with one.
    • James V of Scotland; Scots cited in The Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany, vol. 5 (January 1787), p. 32, col. 1; Englished by David Hume, The History of England (1763), vol. 4, ch. 33, p. 249
  • In every disadvantage that a woman suffers at the hands of a man, there is inevitably, in what concerns the man, an element of cowardice. When I say "inevitably," I mean that this is what the woman sees in it.
  • The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
  • She had an intellect masculine in its range and detachment—a type of intellect possessed by some women in all ages, not, as they are apt to suppose it, the peculiar possession of modern women.
  • He’s got tired of her now, has Martin. He said she took so much worshipping she made his knees sore.
    • Storm Jameson, Three Kingdoms (1926), ch. 7
  • Quae mala sint hominum rebus tria maxima scire
    Quaeris? Habe paucis: femina, flamma, fretum.
    • Would'st know men's greatest dangers? They are three:
      Woman the first, then fire, and then sea.
    • Johannes Secundus, Tria Mala ("The Three Daughters"); tr. F. A. Wright, The Love Poems (1930), p. 193
  • One woman reads another's character
    Without the tedious trouble of deciphering.
  • A skein of silk without a knot!
    A fair march made without a halt!
    A curious form without a fault!
    A printed book without a blot!
    All beauty!—and without a spot.
  • And where she went, the flowers took thickest root,
    As she had sow'd them with her odorous foot.
  • Follow a shadow, it still flies you;
    Seem to fly it, it will pursue:
    So court a mistress, she denies you;
    Let her alone, she will court you.
    Say, are not women truly then
    Styled but the shadows of us men.
    • Ben Jonson, "That Women are but Men’s Shadows", Works (1616)
  • A woman, the more curious she is about her face, is commonly the more careless about her house.
    • Ben Jonson, Timber: or, Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter (1641)
  • I am very fond of the company of ladies. I like their beauty, I like their delicacy, I like their vivacity, and I like their silence.
  • Ladies, stock and tend your hive,
    Trifle not at thirty-five;
    For, howe'er we boast and strive,
    Life declines from thirty-five;
    He that ever hopes to thrive
    Must begin by thirty-five.
  • Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.
    • Samuel Johnson, of a Quaker woman, quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), entry for 31 July 1763
  • Férfi sorsa a nő!
    • Man's fate is woman!
    • Mór Jókai, A tengerszemű hölgy (1889), ch. 7 (tr. R. Nisbet Bain, 1894)
  • We'll sport and be free with Moll, Betty, and Dolly,
    Have oysters and lobsters to cure melancholy:
    Fish-dinners will make a lass spring like a flea,
         Dame Venus, love's lady,
         Was born of the sea.
  • Nulla fere causa est in qua non femina litem moverit.
    • There's scarce a case comes on but you shall find
      A woman's at the bottom.
    • Juvenal, Satires, no. 6, l. 242. Translation reported in Hoyt's (1922), p. 890
  • Intolerabilius nihil est quam fœmina dives.
    • Nothing so intolerable as a rich woman.
    • Juvenal, Satires, no. 6, l. 460. Reported in King (1904), p. 143, no. 1126
  •       Vindicta
    Nemo magis gaudet, quam femina.

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  • Women are encouraged to have careers because their talents are useful to the system and, more importantly, because by having regular jobs women become better integrated into the system and tied directly to it rather than to their families. This helps to weaken family solidarity.
  • Une femme qui écrit a deux torts: elle augmente le nombre des livres, et elle diminue le nombre des femmes.
    • A woman who writes commits two sins: she increases the number of books, and decreases the number of women.
    • Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, Nouvelles guêpes, vol. 3 (1853), p. 89
  • Dans la vie, comme à la promenade, une femme doit s'appuyer sur un homme un peu plus grand qu'elle.
    • In life, as in a promenade, woman must lean on a man above her.
    • Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, Nouvelles guêpes, vol. 3 (1853), p. 89
    • Reported in de Finod (1881), pp. 14, 85; Ballou (1881), p. 23
  • Behind each woman rises the austere, sacred and mysterious face of Aphrodite. ... Dame Hortense was only an ephemeral and transparent mask which Zorba tore away to kiss the eternal mouth.
  • A woman's body is a dark and monstrous mystery;
    between her supple thighs a heavy whirlpool swirls,
    two rivers crash, and woe to him who slips and falls!
  • I met a lady in the meads
      Full beautiful—a faery's child,
    Her hair was long, her foot was light,
      And her eyes were wild.
  • I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a poem and to be given away by a novel.
    • John Keats, Letter to Fanny Brawne (8 July 1819); H. E. Rollins (ed.) The Letters of John Keats (1958), vol. 2, p. 127
  • I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand worlds. ... I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate, that I am content to be alone. Those things, combined with the opinion I have formed of the generality of women, who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar-plum than my time, form a barrier against matrimony which I rejoice in.
  • Of all the stages in a woman’s life, none is so dangerous as the period between her acknowledgment of a passion for a man, and the day set apart for her nuptials.
  •          A young maiden's heart
    Is a rich soil, wherein lie many germs,
    Hid by the cunning hand of nature there
    To put forth blossoms in their fittest season;
    And tho' the love of home first breaks the soil,
    With its embracing tendrils clasping it,
    Other affections, strong and warm, will grow,
    While that one fades, as summer's flush of bloom
    Succeeds the gentle budding of the spring.
    Maids must be wives, and mothers, to fulfil
    Th' entire and holiest end of woman's being.
    • Fanny Kemble, The Star of Seville (1837), act 1, sc. 1 (loq. Petruchio)
  • The man who feels no impulse toward the study of woman may, as far as I am concerned, be what he will; one thing he certainly is not, he is no aesthetician.
  • When God created Eve, He let a deep sleep fall upon Adam; for woman is the man's dream.
    • Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (1843), pt. 1, sec. 6 — "Diary of the Seducer" (tr. Alastair Hannay, 1992)
  • It is at the touch of love that she first awakens; before that she is dream.
    • Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (1843), pt. 1, sec. 6 — "Diary of the Seducer" (tr. Alastair Hannay, 1992)
  • The woman is substance, the man is reflection.
    • Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (1843), pt. 1, sec. 6 — "Diary of the Seducer" (tr. Alastair Hannay, 1992)
  • Sometimes you have to be a high-riding bitch to survive...Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto.
  • But king Solomon loved many strange women.
  • For men must work and women must weep,
    And the sooner it's over the sooner to sleep,
    And good-bye to the bar and its moaning.
  • I've taken my fun where I've found it,
    An' now I must pay for my fun,
    For the more you 'ave known o' the others
    The less will you settle to one;
    An' the end of it's sittin' and thinkin',
    An' dreamin' Hell-fires to see;
    So be warned by my lot (which I know you will not),
    An' learn about women from me!
  • An' I learned about women from 'er!
  • When you get to a man in the case,
    They're like as a row of pins—
    For the Colonel's Lady an' Judy O'Grady
    Are sisters under their skins!
  • Look at young Davies makin' an ass of himself over mutton-dressed-as-lamb old enough to be his mother!
    • Rudyard Kipling, The Day's Work (1898), "The Brushwood Boy"
  • A Nation spoke to a Nation,
    A Queen sent word to a Throne:
    'Daughter am I in my mother's house,
    But mistress in my own.
    The gates are mine to open,
    As the gates are mine to close,
    And I set my house in order,'
    Said our Lady of the Snows.
    • Rudyard Kipling, "Our Lady of the Snows", st. 1, in Collected Works, vol. 26 (1941, reprinted 1970), p. 227. The poem is about the Canadian preferential tariff of 1897
  • But I consort with long-haired things
    In velvet collar-rolls,
    Who talk about the Aims of Art,
    And ‘theories’ and ‘goals’,
    And moo and coo with women-folk
    About their blessed souls.
    • Rudyard Kipling, In Partibus (1909)
  • What is a woman that you forsake her,
    And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
    To go with the old grey Widow-maker?
    • Rudyard Kipling, "Harp Song of the Dane Women", Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906)
  • ’Tisn’t beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It’s just It. Some women’ll stay in a man’s memory if they once walked down a street.
    • Rudyard Kipling, "Mrs Bathurst", Traffics and Discoveries (1904)
  • When the Hymalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
    He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
    But the she-bear thus accosted, rends the peasant tooth and nail,
    For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
    * * * * * *
    So it comes that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer
    With his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for her
    Where, at war with Life and Conscience, he uplifts his erring hands
    To some God of Abstract justice—which no woman understands.
    And Man knows it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave him
    Must command but may not govern—shall enthral but not enslave him.
    And She knows, because She warns him, and Her instincts never fail,
    That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male.
    • Rudyard Kipling, "The Female of the Species: A Study in Natural History", in The Morning Post (20 October 1911)
 
Worlds may change, galaxies disintegrate — but a woman is always a woman.
  • All sensible people agree in thinking that large seminaries of young ladies, though managed with all the vigilance and caution which human abilities can exert, are in danger of great corruption.
  • That learning belongs not to the female character, and that the female mind is not capable of a degree of improvement equal to that of the other sex, are narrow and unphilosophical prejudices.
    • Vicesimus Knox, Essays, Moral and Literary (1782), no. 142

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  • L'homme jouit du bonheur qu'il ressent, et la femme de celui qu'elle procure. Cette différence, si essentielle et si peu remarquée, influe pourtant, d'une manière bien sensible, sur la totalité de leur conduite respective. Le plaisir de l'un est de satisfaire des désirs, celui de l’autre est surtout de les faire naître.
    • Man enjoys the happiness he feels, woman the happiness she gives. This difference, so essential and yet so seldom noticed, has a marked difference on the whole of their respective behaviour. A man's pleasure is to satisfy desires, a woman's is chiefly to arouse them.
    • Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), ep. 130 (tr. Richard Aldington, 1924)
  • Il y a une femme à l'origine de toutes les grandes choses.
    • There is a woman at the beginning of all great things.
    • Alphonse de Lamartine, Histoire des Girondins, vol. 2 (Brussels: Meline, 1847), bk. 8, sec. 1
    • Reported in Ballou (1881), p. 281
  • What! still retaining your Utopian visions of female felicity? To talk of our happiness!—ours, the ill-used and oppressed! You remind me of the ancient tyrant, who, seeing his slaves sink under the weight of their chains, said, 'Do look at the indolent repose of those people!'
  • Whenever I hear a man talking of the advantages of our ill-used sex, I look upon it as the prelude to some new act of authority.
  • A woman only can understand a woman; and it is pleasant to be understood sometimes.
  • Stans close around, ye Stygian set,
       With Dirce in one boat convey’d!
    Or Charon, seeing, may forget
       That he is old and she a shade.
  • Past ruin’d Ilion Helen lives,
       Alcestis rises from the shades;
    Verse calls them forth; ’tis verse that gives
       Immortal youth to mortal maids.
    • Walter Savage Landor, "To Ianthe", Gebir, Count Julian, &c. (1831)
  • If children cease to be altogether desirable, women cease to be altogether necessary.
  • You came not in the world without our pain,
    Make that a bar against your cruelty;
    Your fault being greater, why should you disdain
    Our being your equals, free from tyranny?
  • Every phase of our life belongs to us. The moon does not, except in appearance, lose her first thin, luminous curve, nor her silvery crescent, in rounding to her full. The woman is still both child and girl, in the completeness of womanly character. We have a right to our entire selves, through all the changes of this mortal state, a claim which we shall doubtless carry along with us into the unfolding mysteries of our eternal being. Perhaps in this thought lies hidden the secret of immortal youth: for a seer has said that "to grow old in heaven is to grow young."
    • Lucy Larcom, A New England Girlhood: Outlined from Memory (1889)
  • Sie empfinden mehr. Empfindung ist Kraft der Weiblichkeit. Sie herrschen oft tiefer, kräftiger, als die Männer, aber nicht mit Zorn und Donnerwort — (thun sie's, Weiber sind sie nicht mehr — sind Mißgeburten, in so fern sie so herrschen) herrschen mit diesem Blicke, dieser Thräne, diesem Seufzer!
    • Women feel more: sensibility is the power of women. They often rule more effectually, more sovereignly, than man. They rule with tender looks, tears, and sighs, but not with passion and threats; for if, or when, they so rule, they are no longer women, but abortions.
    • Johann Kaspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente, vol. 3 (1777), sec. 11, p. 295
    • The Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany, vol. 11 (January 1790), p. 16
  • Whatever littleness and vanity is to be observed in the minds of women, it is like the cruelty of butchers, a temper that is wrought into them by that life which they are taught and accustomed to lead.
  • For the pursuit of business her head is all wrong. Figures confuse her. She lacks sustained attention and in point of morals the average woman is, even for business, too crooked.
  • Woman, a pleasing but a short-lived flow'r,
    Too soft for business and too weak for pow'r:
    A wife in bondage, or neglected maid;
    Despised, if ugly; if she's fair, betrayed.
  • Being a woman is of special interest only to aspiring male transsexuals. To actual women, it is simply a good excuse not to play football.
  • I have observed among all nations, that the women ornament themselves, more than the men; that, wherever found, they are the same kind, civil, obliging, humane, tender beings; that they are ever inclined to be gay and cheerful, timorous and modest. They do not hesitate, like man, to perform a hospitable or generous action; not haughty, nor arrogant, nor supercilious, but full of courtesy, and fond of society; industrious, economical, ingenuous; more liable in general, to err, than man, but in general, also, more virtuous, and performing more good actions than he. I never addressed myself, in the language of decency and friendship, to a woman, whether civilized or savage, without receiving a decent and friendly answer. With man it has often been otherwise. In wandering over the barren plains of inhospitable Denmark, through honest Sweden, frozen Lapland, rude and churlish Finland, unprincipled Russia, and the wide spread regions of the wandering Tartar, if hungry, dry, cold, wet, or sick, woman has ever been friendly to me, and uniformly so; and to add to this virtue, so worthy of the appellation of benevolence, these actions have been performed in so free and so kind a manner, that, if I was dry, I drank the sweet draught, and, if hungry, ate the coarse morsel, with a double relish.
  • (Que) el ser malas las mujeres
    Es delito delos hombres.
    • If women are bad the fault is that of men.
    • Francisco Leiva, El Socorro de los Mantos, act 1 — loq. Inés (tr. Harbottle and Hume, 1907)
  • Une femme sensée ne doit jamais prendre de mari sans le consentement de sa raison et d'amants sans l'aveu de son cœur.
    • A sensible woman never should fall in love without her heart's consent, nor marry without that of her reason.
    • Ninon de l'Enclos, Correspondance authentique (Paris, 1886), p. 61. Reported in Jones (1901), p. 344
  • It’s no accident that #Metoo started in the entertainment and television-news businesses, where women are required to look as much like Barbie and Bratz dolls as possible, with the help of personal trainers, makeup artists, hair stylists, personal shoppers, and surgeons.
  • O women, women! Who really does understand them? Their smiles contradict their glances, their words promise and beguile, but their tone of voice repulses.
    • Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (1840; rev. 1841), pt. 2 (tr. Martin Parker and Neil Cornwell, 1995)
  • What would a woman not do to hurt a rival!
    • Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (1840; rev. 1841), pt. 2 (tr. Martin Parker and Neil Cornwell, 1995)
  • Ich hab' es immer gesagt: das Weib wollte die Natur zu ihrem Meisterstücke machen.
  • Was hätt ein Weiberkopf erdacht, das er
    Nicht zu beschönen wüsste?
  • Are simple women only fit
    To dress, to darn, to flower, or knit,
    To mind the distaff, or the spit?
    Why are the needle and the pen
    Thought incompatible by men?
    • Esther Lewis (later Clark), A Mirror for Detractors (1754), l. 146
  • There's three things in a Woman's life that should never be empty, her heart, bed and glass.
  • Let any one commend to these female runagates quietness, duty, home-staying, and the whole cohort of Wild Women is like an angry beehive which a rough hand has disturbed.
  • I adore woman, but I want her to keep her place. I don’t want woman to be the coming man!
  • The life of woman is full of woe,
    Toiling on and on and on,
    With breaking heart, and tearful eyes,
    The secret longings that arise,
    Which this world never satisfies!
    Some more, some less, but of the whole
    Not one quite happy, no, not one!
 
A little, tiny, pretty, witty, charming darling she. —Lucretius
  • A Lady with a lamp shall stand
    In the great history of the land,
       A noble type of good,
       Heroic womanhood.
  • I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
  • A woman’s dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.
  • 'Twas kin' o' kingdom-come to look
    On sech a blessed cretur.
 
Earth's noblest thing, a Woman perfected. —James R. Lowell
  • Earth's noblest thing, a Woman perfected.
    • James Russell Lowell, "Irene", l. 62; A Year's Life (1841), p. 117
  • She doeth little kindnesses,
    Which most leave undone, or despise;
    For naught that sets one's heart at ease,
    And giveth happiness or peace,
    Is low-esteemèd in her eyes.
    • James Russell Lowell, "My Love", st. 4; A Year's Life (1841), p. 80
  • "Do you think women ought to have the vote?" I asked him.
    "My mother says," he replied, "that all the clever women have it already."
    • E. V. Lucas, Over Bemerton's: An Easy-Going Chronicle (1908), ch. 18
  • Parvula, pumilio, χαρίτων μία, tota, merum sal.
  • Hail, thou art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.
  • My soul doth magnify the Lord: and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
    For he hath regarded: the lowliness of his handmaiden.
    For, behold, from henceforth: all generations shall call me blessed.
    For he that is mighty hath magnified me: and holy is his Name.
  • Men have broad and large chests, and small narrow hips, and more understanding than the women, who have but small and narrow breasts, and broad hips, to the end they should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear and bring up children.
  • A crudele genus nec fidum femina nomen!
       a pereat, didicit fallere si qua virum.
    • O cruel sex! Woman a treacherous race! Away with her who has learned to play her husband false!
    • Lygdamus, elegy 1, l. 7 (tr. J. P. Postgate, 1912)
  • Campaspe: Were women never so fair, men would be false.
    Apelles: Were women never so false, men would be fond.
  • Seek to be good, but aim not to be great,
    A woman’s noblest station is retreat;
    Her fairest virtues fly from public sight.
    • George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton, Advice to a Lady (1733), p. 6

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  • All sorts of articles and letters appear in the papers about women. Profound questions are raised concerning them. Should they smoke? Should they work? Vote? Take Orders? Marry? Exist? Are not their skirts too short, or their sleeves? Have they a sense of humour, of honour, of direction? Are spinsters superfluous? But how seldom similar inquiries are propounded about men.
  • When all the medical officers have retired for the night, and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she [Florence Nightingale] may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.
    • Mr. MacDonald, on the staff of the London Times, in a letter to that paper when leaving Scutari. See Pictorial History of the Russian War (6 May 1854), p. 310. Reported in Hoyt's (1922), p. 891
  • Le più caritative persone che sieno sono le donne, e le più fastidiose. Chi le scaccia, fugge e fastidii e l'utile; chi le intrattiene, ha l'utile ed e fastidii insieme. Ed è 'l vero che non è el mele sanza le mosche.
    • Women are the most charitable creatures, and the most troublesome. He who shuns women passes up the trouble, but also the benefits. He who puts up with them gains the benefits, but also the trouble. As the saying goes, there's no honey without bees.
    • Niccolò Machiavelli, The Mandrake (1526), act 3, sc. 4 (tr. Peter Constantine, 2009)
  • Women do not find it difficult nowadays to behave like men, but they often find it extremely difficult to behave like gentlemen.
  • Women, I thought: if they fell over a cliff and thought there was company waiting at the bottom, they'd comb their hair on the way down.
  • I would guess that most men who understand women at all feel hostility toward them. At their worst, women are low sloppy beasts.
  • A woman can only be superior as a woman; as soon as she wants to emulate man, she is nothing but an ape.
    • Joseph de Maistre, letter to his daughter Constance. Lettres et opuscules inédits (Paris, 1851), p. 146. Reported in Geneviève Fraisse, Reason's Muse (1994), ch. 5
  • A Learned Woman is thought to be a Comet, that bodes Mischief, when ever it appears.
    • Bathsua Makin, An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen (1673)
  • What woman's fair after we find her faulty? What lady innocent when no longer chaste? Or who so vain to hope for honour, or for pity from that soul who wants it for herself?
  • No thyng ys to man so dere
    As wommanys love yn gode manere.
    A gode womman ys mannys blys
    There her love ryght and stedfast ys;
    There ys no solas undyr hevene
    Of al that a man may nevene,
    That shuld a man so mochë glew
    As a gode womman that loveth trew.
    Ne derer ys none yn goddys hurde
    Than a chaste womman with lovely worde.
  • Here lies a most beautiful lady,
       Light of step and heart was she:
    I think she was the most beautiful lady
       That ever was in the West Country.
    But beauty vanishes, beauty passes,
       However rare, rare it be;
    And when I crumble who shall remember
       That lady of the West Country?
 
Like untun'd golden strings all women are,
Which long time lie untouch'd, will harshly jar.
—Christopher Marlowe
  • Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
    And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
    Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!
    Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!
    Come Helen, come give me my soul again.
    Here will I dwell, for heaven be in these lips,
    And all is dross that is not Helena.
  • Like untun'd golden strings all women are,
    Which long time lie untouch'd, will harshly jar.
    Vessels of brass oft handled, brightly shine;
    What difference betwixt the richest mine
    And basest mould, but use? ...
    Ah, simple Hero, learn thyself to cherish,
    Lone women like to empty houses perish. ...
    One is no number; maids are nothing then,
    Without the sweet society of men.
  • At last, in a world torn by the hatred and wars of men, appears a woman to whom the problems and feats of men are mere child's play. A woman whose identity is known to none, but whose sensational feats are outstanding in a fast-moving world. She serves as a symbol of integrity and humanity, so that the world of men would know what it means to be an Amazon. With a hundred times the agility and strength of our best male athletes and strongest wrestlers, she appears as though from nowhere to avenge an injustice or right a wrong! As lovely as Aphrodite — as wise as Athena — with the speed of Mercury and the strength of Hercules – She is known only as Wonder Woman!
  • What have I done, or tried, or said
    In thanks to that dear woman dead?
    Men triumph over women still,
    Men trample women's rights at will,
    And man's lust roves the world untamed.
    * * * *
    O grave, keep shut lest I be shamed.
  • If women go into politics, they’ll wind up as bad as men.
  • Day unto day her dainty hands
       Make Life's soiled temples clean,
    And there's a wake of glory where
       Her spirit pure hath been.
    At midnight, thro' that shadow-land,
       Her living face doth gleam;
    The dying kiss her shadow, and
       The Dead smile in their dream.
  • How sweetly sounds the voice of a good woman!
    It is so seldom heard, that, when it speaks,
    It ravishes all senses,
  • Now I believe tradition, which doth call
    The Muses, Virtues, Graces, females all.
    Only they are not nine, eleven, or three;
    Our authoress proves them but an unity.
    Mankind, take up some blushes on the score:
    Monopolize perfection hence no more.
    In your own arts confess yourselves outdone;
    The moon hath totally eclipsed the sun;
    Not with her sable mantle muffling him,
    But her bright silver makes his gold look dim:
    Just as his beams force our pale lamps to wink,
    And earthly fires within their ashes sink.
    • Cotton Mather, "Upon Mrs. Anne Bradstreet's Tenth Muse, and written by 'an ingenious person'", in Magnalia Christi Americana (ed. 1855), bk. 1, p. 135
  • A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her, but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.
    • W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (1919), ch. 41
  • A woman will always sacrifice herself if you give her the opportunity. It is her favourite form of self-indulgence.
    • W. Somerset Maugham, The Circle (1921), act 3 (loq. Champion-Cheney)
  • L'Angiolo della Famiglia è la Donna. Madre, sposa, sorella, la donna è la carezza della vita, la soavità dell'affetto diffusa sulle sue fatiche, un riflesso sullo individuo della Provvidenza amorevole che veglia sull'umanità: sono in essa tesori di dolcezza consolatrice che bastano ad ammorzare qualunque dolore. Ed essa è inoltre per ciascun di noi l'iniziatrice dell'avvenire.
    • The Angel of the family is woman. Whether as mother, wife, or sister, woman is the caress of existence, the soft sweetness of affection diffused over its fatigues, a reflection in the individual of that loving Providence which watches over Humanity. She has in her a treasure of gentle consolation sufficient to soothe every sorrow. Moreover, she is for each of us the Initiatrix of the future.
    • Giuseppe Mazzini, Doveri dell'uomo (1860), ch. 6 (tr. E. A. Venturi, 1892)
  • Believe me Delmar, woman is the most fiendish instrument of torture ever devised to bedevil the days of man.
  • Wifehood, the house, a family; they are woman’s traditional concern and each in its way represents one of the other great three—faith, hope, charity—which St. Paul sets down as the virtues of earth. (For how can one rear a family without faith? Or build a roof without hope? Or remain a proper wife without charity?) They are life’s vital elements and no ordered world can endure without them.
  • I think men talk to women so they can sleep with them and women sleep with men so they can talk to them.
  • This lass so neat, with smiles so sweet,
       Has won my right good-will,
    I'd crowns resign to call thee mine,
       Sweet lass of Richmond Hill.
  • Coming to terms with the rhythms of women's lives means coming to terms with life itself, accepting the imperatives of the body rather than the imperatives of an artificial, man-made, perhaps transcendentally beautiful civilization. Emphasis on the male work-rhythm is an emphasis on infinite possibilities; emphasis on the female rhythms is an emphasis on a defined pattern, on limitation.
 
A woman's place is in the House and the Senate.
—Carrie Meek
  • Of all wild beasts on earth or in sea, the greatest is a woman.
    • Menander, E Supposititio, P. 182. Reported in Hoyt's (1922), p. 891
  • Γυναικὶ κόσμος ὁ τρόπος, οὐ τὰ χρυσία.
    • Manners, not jewels, are a woman's ornament,
    • Menander, Monostichoi, l. 92. Quoted by Addison in The Spectator, nos. 265 and 271. Reported in King (1904), p. 111, no. 863
  • On one issue, at least, men and women agree: they both distrust women.
  • God's rarest blessing is, after all, a good woman!
    • George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), ch. 33
 
How can there be on earth a Lone Woman? —Jules Michelet
  • Comment se fait-il qu'il y ait sur la terre une femme seule?
    • How can there be on earth a Lone Woman?
    • Jules Michelet, La Femme (1860), Introduction (tr. J. W. Palmer, 1866)
  • From the very earliest twilight of human society, every woman (owing to the value attached to her by men, combined with her inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a state of bondage to some man.
  • All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all other slaves rely, for maintaining obedience, on fear; either fear of themselves, or religious fears. The masters of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to effect their purpose.
    • John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869), ch. 1
  • The social subordination of women ... stands out an isolated fact in modern social institutions; a solitary breach of what has become their fundamental law; a single relic of an old world of thought and practice exploded in everything else, but retained in the one thing of most universal interest; as if a gigantic dolmen, or a vast temple of Jupiter Olympius, occupied the site of St. Paul's and received daily worship, while the surrounding Christian churches were only resorted to on fasts and festivals.
    • John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869), ch. 1
  • What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing—the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.
    • John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869), ch. 1
  • She is neither pink nor pale,
       And she never will be all mine;
    She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
       And her mouth on a valentine.
  • Dames. Sometimes all they got to do is let it out and a few buckets later there's no way you'd ever know.
    • Frank Miller, "Sin City", serialized in Dark Horse Presents, nos. 51–62 (June 1991–June 1992); retitled The Hard Goodbye in trade paperback; adapted as Sin City (2005 film)
  • O woman, born first to believe us;
    Yea, also born first to forget;
    Born first to betray and deceive us,
    Yet first to repent and regret.
  • The most important thing women have to do is to stir up the zeal of women themselves.
    • John Stuart Mill, Letter to Alexander Bain, 14 July 1869, in Hugh S. R. Elliot (ed.) Letters of John Stuart Mill, vol. 2 (1910)
  •    My latest found,
    Heaven's last best gift, my ever new delight!
  • Neither her outside, form'd so fair, nor aught
    So much delights me, as those graceful acts,
    Those thousand decencies that daily flow
    From all her words and actions, mix'd with love
    And sweet compliance, which declare unfeign'd
    Union of mind, or in us both one soul.
    • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), bk. 7
  • Grace was in all her steps, heaven in her eye,
    In every gesture dignity and love.
    • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), bk. 8, l. 488
  •            Yet when I approach
    Her loveliness, so absolute she seems,
    And in herself complete; so well to know
    Her own, that what she wills to do or say,
    Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best.
    • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), bk. 8, l. 546
  •          Nothing lovelier can be found
    In woman, than to study household good,
    And good works in her husband to promote.
    • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), bk. 9, l. 232
  • O fairest of creation! last and best
    Of all God’s works! creature in whom excell’d
    Whatever can to sight or thought be form’d
    Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet!
    • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), bk. 9, l. 896
  • Oh! why did God,
    Creator wise, that peopled highest Heaven
    With Spirits masculine, create at last
    This novelty on Earth, this fair defect
    Of Nature, and not fill the World at once
    With men as Angels, without feminine.
    • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), bk. 10, l. 888
  • A bevy of fair women.
    • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), bk. 11, l. 582
  •      Wisest men
    Have erred, and by bad women been deceived;
    And shall again, pretend they ne’er so wise.
  • "Always be civil to the girls, you never know whom they may marry" is an aphorism which has saved many an English spinster from being treated like an Indian widow.
  • The female idiocy is not only present, but also necessary, it is not only a physiological fact, but also a physiological postulate. If we want a woman who completely fulfills her maternal profession, she cannot have a male brain. If it could be made that the female faculties would be developed equally to the male ones, the mother organs would atrophy and we would have an ugly and useless hermaphrodite before us. ... Modern foolish women are bad breeders and bad mothers. In the degree to which "civilization" grows, fertility decreases. The better schools become, the worse maternity beds become, the lower the milk secretion becomes, in short, the more unfit the women become.
    • Paul Julius Möbius, Über den physiologischen Schwachsinn des Weibes (1900), pt. 1, sec. 1 (tr. Katinka von Rosen, 2021)
  • La femme est toujours femme, et jamais ne sera que femme, tant qu'entier le monde durera.
    • A woman is always a woman, and will never be anything but a woman as long as the world endures.
    • Molière, Le Dépit amoureux (1656), act 4, sc. 2 (tr. Henri van Laun)
  • Une femme d'esprit est un diable en intrigue.
    • A clever woman is a devil at intrigue.
    • Molière, L'École des Femmes (1662), act 3, sc. 3 (tr. Henri van Laun)
  • Une femme a toujours une vengeance prête.
    • A woman has always a revenge at hand.
    • Molière, Tartuffe (1664), act 2, sc. 2 (tr. Henri van Laun)
  • A Carvalho le molestaba tomar el sol como un lagarto, Pero Teresa demostraba una gran solidaridad con el termostato habitual en todas las mujeres, animales de sangre fría que necesitan el sol y son capaces de someterse a sus rayos con la beatífica expresión del comulgante o incluso con el éxtasis del mistico dispuesto a la entrega divina.
    • Carvalho did not like lying in the sun like a lizard, but Teresa showed that her body thermostat was the same as that of all other women, cold-blooded creatures who need the sun and are capable of soaking up its rays with the beatific expression of someone taking communion, or even the ecstatic look of a mystic surrendering to the godhead.
    • Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Tatuaje (pub. 1976; tr. Nick Caistor, 2008)
  • She was a sharp-jawed, pout-lipped maiden and her eyes were green as scum.
  • Disguise our bondage as we will,
    'Tis woman, woman rules us still.
  • My only books
    Were woman's looks,
    And folly's all they've taught me.
  • For if a young lady has that discretion and modesty, without which all knowledge is little worth, she will never make an ostentatious parade of it, because she will rather be intent on acquiring more, than on displaying what she has.
    • Hannah More, "Thoughts on Conversation", Essays on Various Subjects (1777)
  • The prevailing manners of an age depend more than we are aware, or are willing to allow, on the conduct of the women: this is one of the principal hinges on which the great machine of human society turns.
    • Hannah More, Essays on Various Subjects Principally Designed for Young Ladies (1777)
  • Wet or dry, you're the handsomest woman I ever did see. Spirit and a fine sturdy body. It's a noble combination, Miss Prescott. Why, for you, child bearin' would come as easy as rollin' off a log.
  • Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them. Then if they obey you, seek not a way against them.
  • I think being a woman is like being Irish ... Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

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  • Desubito famam tollunt si quam solam videre in via.
    • If men have seen some woman in the street
      Alone, straightway they raise a scandal.
    • Gnaeus Naevius, fragment of Danae, in Nonius, bk. 4
  • Quasi pila
    in choro ludens datatim dat se et communem facit.
    Alii adnutat, alii adnictat, alium amat alium tenet.
    Alibi manus est occupata, alii pervellit pedem;
    anulum dat alii spectandum, a labris alium invoeat,
    cum alio cantat, at tamen alii suo dat digito litteras.
    • As though she were playing at ball, give-and-take in a ring, she makes herself common property to all men. To one she nods, at another she winks; one she caresses, another embraces. Now elsewhere a hand is kept busy; now she jerks another's foot. To one she gives her ring to look at, to another her lips blow a kiss that invites. She sings a song with one; but waves a message for another with her finger.
    • Gnaeus Naevius, fragment of Tarentilla, in Isidore, Origines, bk. 1, sec. 26 (tr. E. H. Warmington, 1936)
  • Women receive too much consideration in France. They should not be regarded as the equals of men; they are, in fact, mere machines to make children.
    • Napoleon Bonaparte, Conversation, 1817, reported in J. Christopher Herold (ed.) The Mind of Napoleon (1955), sect. 1
  • A girl whose cheeks are covered with paint
    Has an advantage with me over one whose ain't.
    • Ogden Nash, "Biological Reflection", Hard Lines (1931)
  • Sure, deck your lower limbs in pants;
    Yours are the limbs, my sweeting.
    You look divine as you advance—
    Have you seen yourself retreating?
    • Ogden Nash, "What's the Use?", The Face is Familiar (1940)
  • Women would rather be right than reasonable.
    • Ogden Nash, "Frailty, Thy Name is a Misnomer", Good Intentions (1942)
  • So I wonder a woman, the Mistress of Hearts,
    Should ascend to aspire to be Master of Arts;
    A Ministering Angel in Woman we see,
    And an Angel need cover no other Degree.
    —O why should a Woman not get a Degree?
  • ... ut nemo nisi caecus omnino non videat Deum ipsum quicquid pulchritudinis capax est mundus universus in mulierem simul congessisse, ut ob id illam omnis creatura stupescat, et multis nominibus amet ac veneretur.
    • No one who is not utterly blind can fail to see that God gathered all the beauty of which the whole world is capable together in woman, so that all creation might be dazzled by her, and love and venerate her under many names.
    • Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus (1529), 55–56. Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist (1995), ch. 7, pp. 232, 307
  • Man is for woman, a means: the purpose is always the child. But what is woman for man? Two different things wanteth the true man: danger and diversion. Therefore wanteth he woman, as the most dangerous plaything.
    • Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883) (tr. Thomas Common, 1909) — loq. Zarathustra
  • Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly.
    • Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883) (tr. A. Tille and M. M. Bozman, 1933) — loq. Zarathustra
  • Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergiss die Peitsche nicht!
    • You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!
    • Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883) (tr. Walter Kaufmann, 1954) — loq. Old Woman
  • Supposing truth is a woman—what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? That the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman's heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won.
  • Women want to become independent. To this end they are beginning to enlighten men about "women as such." This is one of the worst aspects of progress in the general uglification of Europe.
    • Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886), sect. 232 (tr. Marianne Cowan, 1955)
  • In no age has the weaker sex been treated with as much respect by men as in ours: that belongs to the democratic inclination and basic taste, just like disrespectfulness for old age.
    • Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886), sect. 239 (tr. Walter Kaufmann, 1966)
  • Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit, woman now aspires to the economic and legal self-reliance of a clerk.
    • Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886), sect. 239 (tr. Walter Kaufmann, 1966)
  • On aime plus âprement que l'on ne hait.
    • We women love more bitterly than we hate.
    • Anna de Noailles, Poème de l'amour (1924), sect. 102
  • A crowd of women around me doing the ocean of women’s work that never subsided and never changed and always swallowed whatever time you gave it and wanted more, another hungry body of water. I submerged into it like a ritual bath and let it close over my head gladly.

O

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  • Today, women make up about half our workforce, but they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it's an embarrassment. Women deserve equal pay for equal work.
  • She was a fine dashing woman, and without being either pretty or beautiful she gave the impression of being both, mostly from the splendid way she carried her head.
  • Oh, God, who does not exist, you hate women, otherwise you'd have made them different. And Jesus, who snubbed your mother, you hate them more.
  • Pinge, precor, pictor, tali candore puellam,
    Qualem pinxit Amor, qualem meus ignis anhelat.
    Nil pingendo neges; tegat omnia Serica vestis,
    Quae totum prodat tenui velamine corpus.
    Te quoque pulset amor, crucient pigmenta medullas:
    Si bonus es pictor, miseri suspiria pinge.
    • Paint a whitelimbed girl for me
      Such as love himself might fashion;
      So that nothing hidden be,
      Paint her with a lover's passion.
      Through her silken garments show
      All her body's rosy wonder—
      Love will set your sense aglow,
      Longing tear your heart asunder.
      Call it, when your work you scan,
      "Portrait of a wretched man."
    • Octavianus, tr. H. M. Jones, The Romanesque Lyric (1928), pp. 108, 329
  • (Nam) corporea pulchritudo in pelle solummodo constat. Nam si viderent homines hoc quod subtus pellem est, sicut lynces in Boetia cernere interiora feruntur, mulieres videre nausearent. Iste decor in flegmate, et sanguine, et humore, ac felle, consistit. Si quis enim considerat quae intra nares, et quae intra fauces, et quae intra ventrem lateant, sordes utique reperiet. Et si nec extremis digitis flegma vel stercus tangere patimur, quomodo ipsum stercoris saccum amplecti desideramus?
    • For bodily beauty is but skin-deep; if men could see below the skin, as the lynxes of Boeotia are said to see into the inward parts, then the sight of a woman would be nauseous unto them. All that beauty consisteth but in phlegm and blood and humours and gall. If a man consider that which is hidden within the nose, the throat, and the belly, he will find filth everywhere; and, if we cannot bring ourselves, even with the tips of our fingers, to touch such phlegm or dung, wherefore do we desire to embrace this bag of filth itself?
    • Odo of Cluny, Collationes (Collationum Libri Tres), bk. 2, sec. 9 (ed. J. P. Migne, 1853; tr. G. G. Coulton, 1923)
  •        Myriad are the phantasies
       That trouble the still dreams of maidenhood,
    And wonderful the radiant entities
       Shaped in the passion of her brain and blood.
    O Fancy! through the realm of guesses fly,
       Unlock the rich abstraction of her heart
         (Her soul is second in the mystery):
    Trail thy gold meshes through the summer sky;
       Question her tender breathings as they part,
         Tell me, Revealer, that she thinks of me.
  • What mighty ills have not been done by woman!
    Who was't betray'd the Capitol? A woman;
    Who lost Mark Antony the world? A woman;
    Who was the cause of a long ten years' war,
    And laid at last old Troy in ashes? Woman;
    Destructive, damnable, deceitful woman!
  •      Who can describe
    Women's hypocrisies! their subtle wiles,
    Betraying smiles, feign'd tears, inconstancies!
    Their painted outsides, and corrupted minds,
    The sum of all their follies, and their falsehoods.
    • Thomas Otway, The Orphan (1680), act 3, sc. 1
  • O woman! lovely woman! Nature made thee
    To temper man: we had been brutes without you;
    Angels are painted fair, to look like you:
    There's in you all that we believe of Heaven,
    Amazing brightness, purity, and truth,
    Eternal joy, and everlasting love.
 
They come to see; they come that they themselves may be seen. —Ovid
  • Spectatum veniunt, veniunt spectentur ut ipsae.
    • They come to see; they come that they themselves may be seen.
    • Ovid, Ars Amatoria, bk. 1, l. 99 (tr. Henry T. Riley, 1852)
    • Cf. Chaucer, Wyf of Bath, Prologue, l. 6134:
      And for to see, and eke for to be seye.
  • Nocte latent mendae, vitioque ignoscitur omni,
    Horaque formosam quamlibet illa facit.
    • By night are blemishes hid, and every fault is forgiven: that hour makes any woman fair.
    • Ovid, Ars Amatoria, bk. 1, ll. 249–50 (tr. J. H. Mozley, 1929)
  • Procul hinc, procul este, severae!
    • Away from me, far away, ye austere fair!
    • Ovid, Amores, bk. 2, no. 1, l. 3 (tr. Grant Showerman, 1914)
  • Et amârunt me quoque Nymphæ.
    • I too have been loved by the Nymphs.
    • Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk. 3, l. 456. "I too have found women to love me." Words of Narcissus on being unable to grasp his own reflection in the water. Reported in King (1904), p. 90, no. 696
  • Esse bonam facile est, ubi quod vetet esse remotum est.
    • It is easy for a woman to be good, when all that hinders her from being so is removed.
    • Ovid, Tristia, 5, 14, 25. Reported in King (1904), p. 88, no. 673

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  • The femme fatale is one of the most mesmerizing of sexual personae. She is not a fiction but an extrapolation of biologic realities in women that remain constant.
  • If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.
    • Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1990), ch. 1
  • There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.
    • Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1990), ch. 8
  • Male conspiracy cannot explain all female failures. ... Genius is not checked by social obstacles: it will overcome. Men's egotism, so disgusting in the talentless, is the source of their greatness as a sex. ... Even now, with all vocations open, I marvel at the rarity of the woman driven by artistic or intellectual obsession, that self-mutilating derangement of social relationship which, in its alternate forms of crime and ideation, is the disgrace and glory of the human species.
    • Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1990), ch. 24
  • If we take a survey of ages and of countries, we shall find the women, almost—without exception—at all times and in all places, adored and oppressed. Man, who has never neglected an opportunity of exerting his power, in paying homage to their beauty, has always availed himself of their weakness. He has been at once their tyrant and their slave.
    • Anonymous (attributed to Thomas Paine), "An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex", in the Pennsylvania Magazine (August 1775); Moncure D. Conway (ed.) The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 1 (1906), p. 59
  • Zeus, in place of fire, bestowed another fire, woman. Would that neither woman nor fire had come into being! Fire, it is true, is soon put out, but woman is a fire unquenchable, flaming, ever alight.
  • Yet this the need of woman, this her curse:
    To range her little gifts, and give, and give,
    Because the throb of giving’s sweet to bear.
  • Men seldom make passes
    At girls who wear glasses.
    • Dorothy Parker, "News Item", Enough Rope (1926), p. 85
    • Ogden Nash, "Lines Written to Console the Ladies...", Hard Lines (1930), p. 21:
      A girl who is bespectacled
      Don’t even get her nectacled,
      But safety pins and bassinets
      Await the girl who fascinets.
    • Christopher Morley, "Postscript to a Famous Verse", The Middle Kingdom (1944), p. 102:
      But glasses can always be checked
      By a girl who’s about to be necked.
    • Letty Cottin Pogrebin, "Down with Sexist Upbringing", in Ms. magazine (Spring 1972), p. 25:
      Boys don't make passes at female smart-asses.
  • The ladies men admire, I’ve heard,
    Would shudder at a wicked word.
    Their candle gives a single light;
    They’d rather stay at home at night.
    They do not keep awake till three,
    Nor read erotic poetry.
    They never sanction the impure,
    Nor recognize an overture.
    They shrink from powders and from paints...
    So far, I’ve had no complaints.
    • Dorothy Parker, "Interview", Enough Rope (1926), p. 106
  • He was as much an admirer of the fair sex, so that when once on a specially dashing woman appearing in the gallery of the New South Wales Assembly, and Parkes being asked who she was, replied in sardonic style: "Well I don't know myself. I've asked George Reid and Wise, and they don't know, from which I conclude that she must be a woman of good reputation."
  • Kind Katherine to her husband kiss'd these words,
       "Mine own sweet Will, how dearly do I love thee!"
    "If true," quoth Will, "the world no such affords."
       And that it's true I durst his warrant be:
    For ne'er heard I of woman, good or ill,
    But always lovèd best her own sweet will.
 
She is older than the rocks among which she sits. —Walter Pater
  • She is older than the rocks among which she sits: like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.
  • Ah, wasteful woman! she who may
    On her sweet self set her own price,
    Knowing man cannot choose but pay,
    How has she cheapen'd Paradise!
    How given for nought her priceless gift,
    How spoil'd the bread and spill'd the wine,
    Which, spent with due respective thrift,
    Had made brutes men and men divine.
  • Patience makes a woman beautiful in middle age.
    • Attributed to Elliot Paul. Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted (1989), p. 377
  • Man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. And man was not created for the cause of the woman, but the woman for the cause of man; and therefore ought the woman to have a power upon her head.
  • But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering.
    • Paul of Tarsus, 1 Corinthians 11:15 (KJV)
  • Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak. If they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.
    • Paul of Tarsus, 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 (KJV)
  • I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.
  • Silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts.
  • To chase the clouds of life's tempestuous hours,
    To strew its short but weary way with flow'rs,
    New hopes to raise, new feelings to impart,
    And pour celestial balsam on the heart;
    For this to man was lovely woman giv'n,
    The last, best work, the noblest gift of Heav'n.
  • Crede ratem ventis, animum ne crede puellis;
      namque est feminea tutior unda fide.
    femina nulla bona est, vel, si bona contigit una,
      nescio quo fato est res mala facta bona.
    • Trust to the winds thy barque, but to a girl
      Never thy heart's affections; for the swirl
      Of ocean wave is less to be eschewed
      Than woman's faith. No woman can be good,
      Or if a good one comes, then freakish fate
      Good out of ill has managed to create.
    • Pentadius, De femina (tr. J. Wright Duff, 1934)
  • When a man is gone, all are wont to praise him, and should your merit be ever so transcendent, you will still find it difficult not merely to overtake, but even to approach their renown. The living have envy to contend with, while those who are no longer in our path are honoured with a goodwill into which rivalry does not enter. On the other hand, if I must say anything on the subject of female excellence to those of you who will now be in widowhood, it will be all comprised in this brief exhortation. Great will be your glory in not falling short of your natural character; and greatest will be hers who is least talked of among the men, whether for good or for bad.
  • Women's liberation could have not succeeded if science had not provided them with contraception and household technology.
    • Max Ferdinand Perutz, "The Impact of Science on Society: The Challenge for Education", in J. L. Lewis and P. J. Kelly (eds.), Science and Technology and Future Human Needs (1987), p. 18
  • Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered.
  • In terram Salicam mulieres ne succedant.
  • We cannot choose; our faces madden men!
  •      ... when we women sin, 'tis not
    By art; it is not easy, it is not light;
    It is our agony shot through with bliss:
    We sway and rock and suffer ere we fall.
    • Stephen Phillips, Paolo and Francesca (1900), act 4, sc. 1 (Francesca)
  • La donna è mobile
    Qual pium' al vento,
    Muta accento, e di pensier.
    • Woman is as light as a feather before the breeze. Her tone and thoughts are ever changing.
    • Francesco Maria Piave, Rigoletto, act 3, sc. 2 (Music by Verdi). Reported in King (1904), pp. 158–9, no. 1232
  • Affections are as thoughts to her, the measure of her hours;
    Her feelings have the fragrancy, the freshness, of young flowers;
    And lonely passions, changing oft, so fill her, she appears
    The image of themselves by turns,—the idol of past years!
    • Edward Coote Pinkney, "A Health", st. 3, in Specimens of American Poetry, vol. 3 (Boston, 1829), p. 84
  • I fill this cup to one made up
       Of loveliness alone,
    A woman, of her gentle sex
       The seeming paragon;
    To whom the better elements
       And kindly stars have given
    A form so fair, that, like the air,
       'Tis less of earth than heaven.
    • Edward Coote Pinkney, "A Health", st. 1; Poems (Baltimore, 1825)
  • Those who always speak well of women do not know them sufficiently; those who always speak ill of them do not know them at all.
  • The First Time she was grave, as well she might,
    For Women will be damn'd sullen the first Night;
    But faith, they'l quickly mend, so be n't uneasie:
    To Night she's brisk, and trys New Tricks to please ye.
    • Mary Pix, The Spanish Wives (1696), Prologue
  • Since God chose His spouse from among women, most excellent Lady, because of your honor, not only should men refrain from reproaching women but should also hold them in great reverence.
  • Every woman adores a Fascist,
    The boot in the face, the brute
    Brute heart of a brute like you.
  • Out of the ash
    I rise with my red hair
    And I eat men like air.
  • In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
    Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
    • Sylvia Plath, "Mirror" (wr. 1961); Crossing the Water (1971)
  • Laïs of the haughty smile,
    The despair of Greece erewhile,
    Whose doors fond gallants wont to crowd,
    Hath her glass to Venus vowed:
    "Since what I am I will not see,
    And cannot what I used to be."
  • Nam multum loquaces merito omnes habemus,
    Nec mutam profecto repertam ullam esse
    Hodie dicunt mulierem ullo in seculo.
    • I know that we women are all justly accounted praters; they say in the present day that there never was in any age such a wonder to be found as a dumb woman.
    • Plautus, Aulularia, act 2. sc. 1, l. 5
  • Multa sunt mulierum vitia, sed hoc e multis maximum,
    Cum sibi nimis placent, nimisque operam dant ut placeant viris.
    • Women have many faults, but of the many this is the greatest, that they please themselves too much, and give too little attention to pleasing the men.
    • Plautus, Pœnulus, act 5, sc. 4, l. 33
  • Mulieri nimio male facere melius est onus, quam bene.
    • A woman finds it much easier to do ill than well.
    • Plautus, Truculentus, act 2, sc. 5, l. 17
    • Translations from Plautus above reported in Hoyt's (1922), p. 892
  • Mulier recte olet, ubi nihil olet.
    • A woman smells sweetest when she smells of nothing.
    • Plautus, Mostellaria, act 1, sc. 3, l. 116. Reported in King (1904), p. 206, no. 1586. Also in Montaigne, Essays, ch. 55 (tr. Florio):
      Then smels a woman purely well,
      When she of nothing else doth smell.
  • Mulier profecto nata est ex ipsa mora.
    • Woman certainly is the offspring of tardiness itself.
    • Plautus, Miles Gloriosus, act 4, sc. 7, l. 9. Reported in King (1904), p. 206, no. 1584
  • Postremo modus muliebris nullust: numquam
    Lavando et fricando scimus facere finem.
    • In fine, there's no moderation in women, nor do we understand how ever to set a limit to washing and scrubbing.
    • Plautus, Pœnulus, act 1, sc. 2, l. 21 (tr. H. T. Riley, 1912)
  • When her guests were awash with champagne and with gin
    She was recklessly sober, as sharp as a pin:
    An abstemious man would reel at her look
    As she rolled a bright eye and praised his last book.
    • William Plomer, "Slightly Foxed", l. 25; The Dorking Thigh and Other Satires (1945)
  • Oh! say not woman's heart is bought
    With vain and empty treasure.
    * * * * *
    Deep in her heart the passion glows;
    She loves and loves forever.
  • Così fan tutti.
    • So do they all.
    • The way of the world. Così fan tutte ("All women are alike") is the title of the opera of Mozart, Vienna, 1790, words by Lorenzo Da Ponte. Reported in King (1904), p. 50, no. 374
 
Mistress of herself, though china fall.
—Alexander Pope
  • Most women have no characters at all.
  • Ladies, like variegated tulips, show
    'Tis to their changes half their charms we owe.
    • Alexander Pope, Moral Essays (1731-35), ep. 2, l. 41
  • Offend her, and she knows not to forgive;
    Oblige her, and she'll hate you while you live.
    • Alexander Pope, Moral Essays (1731-35), ep. 2, l. 137
  • Men some to business, some to pleasure take;
    But every woman is at heart a rake;
    Men some to quiet, some to public strife;
    But every lady would be queen for life.
    • Alexander Pope, Moral Essays (1731-35), ep. 2, l. 215
  • O! bless'd with temper, whose unclouded ray
    Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day;
    She who can own a sister's charms, or hear
    Sighs for a daughter with unwounded ear;
    She who ne'er answers till a husband cools,
    Or, if she rules him, never shows she rules.
    Charms by accepting, by submitting sways,
    Yet has her humour most when she obeys.
    • Alexander Pope, Moral Essays (1731-35), ep. 2, l. 257
  • And mistress of herself, though china fall.
    • Alexander Pope, Moral Essays (1731-35), ep. 2, l. 268
  • Woman's at best a contradiction still.
    • Alexander Pope, Moral Essays (1731-35), ep. 2, l. 270
  • Our grandsire, Adam, ere of Eve possesst,
    Alone, and e'en in Paradise unblest,
    With mournful looks the blissful scenes survey'd,
    And wander'd in the solitary shade.
    The Maker saw, took pity, and bestow'd
    Woman, the last, the best reserv'd of God.
    • Alexander Pope, "January and May", l. 63, in Works (1717), after Chaucer's "Merchant's Tale"
  • Heaven gave to woman the peculiar grace
    To spin, to weep, and cully human race.
  • With varying vanities, from ev'ry part,
    They shift the moving toyshop of their heart.
  • If to her share some female errors fall,
    Look on her face, and you'll forget 'em all.
    • Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1714), canto 2, l. 17
  • She went, to plain-work, and to purling brooks,
    Old-fashioned halls, dull aunts, and croaking rooks:
    She went from op’ra, park, assembly, play,
    To morning-walks, and prayers three hours a day;
    To pass her time ’twixt reading and Bohea,
    To muse, and spill her solitary tea,
    Or o’er cold coffee trifle with the spoon,
    Court the slow clock, and dine exact at noon.
    • Alexander Pope, "Epistle to Miss Blount, on her leaving the Town, after the Coronation", Works (1717)
  • I know that a woman's nature is thought too weak to endure a secret; but good rearing and excellent companionship go far towards strengthening the character, and it is my happy lot to be both the daughter of Cato and the wife of Brutus.
  • And she is dying piece-meal
       of a sort of emotional anæmia.
    * * * * *
    In her is the end of breeding.
    Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
    She would like some one to speak to her,
    And is almost afraid that I
       will commit that indiscretion.
  • Ὦ διὰ τῶν θυρίδων καλὸν ἐμβλέποισα,
    παρθένε τὰν κεφαλάν, τὰ δ᾽ἔνερθε νύμφα.
    • O Miss, from out your window blowing kisses—
      A Miss by your face, but lower down a Mrs.
    • Praxilla, Fragment (Hephaestion, On Metre, 25)
    • Tr. M. L. West, Greek Lyric Poetry (Oxford UP, 1994), p. 189
  • Any woman who has a career and a family automatically develops something in the way of two personalities, like two sides of a dollar bill, each different in design. But one can complement the other to make a valuable whole. Her problem is to keep one from draining the life from the other. She can achieve happiness only as long as she keeps the two in balance.
  • Be to her virtues very kind;
    Be to her faults a little blind.
    Let all her ways be unconfin'd;
    And clap your padlock—on her mind.
  • The gray mare will prove the better horse.
    • Matthew Prior, Epilogue to Lucius. Last line. Butler, Hudibras, pt. 2, canto 50, l. 698. Fielding—The Grub Street Opera, act 2, sc. 4. Pryde and Abuse of Women (1550). The Marriage of True Wit and Science. Macaulay—History of England, vol. 1, ch. 3. Footnote suggests it arose from the preference generally given to the gray mares of Flanders over the finest coach horses of England. Proverb traced to Holland (1546). Reported in Hoyt's (1922), p. 893
 
As a jewel of gold in a swine's snout, so is a fair woman which is without discretion. —Proverbs
  • As a jewel of gold in a swine's snout, so is a fair woman which is without discretion.
  • It is better to live in a desert land than with a quarrelsome and fretful woman.
    • Proverbs 21:19 (ESV)
    • It is better to dwell in a corner of the housetop than with a brawling woman in a wide house. (KJV)
  • Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies.
    • Proverbs 31:10 (KJV)
  • Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain; but a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised.
    • Proverbs 31:30 (KJV)
  • Kings’ daughters were among thy honourable women: upon thy right hand did stand the queen in a vesture of gold, wrought about with divers colours.
  • The King’s daughter is all glorious within: her clothing is of wrought gold. She shall be brought unto the King in raiment of needlework: the virgins that be her fellows shall bear her company, and shall be brought unto thee.
    • Psalm 45:14 (KJV)
  • Instead of thy fathers thou shalt have children: whom thou mayest make princes in all lands.
    • Psalm 45:17 (KJV)
  • Чем меньше женщину мы любим,
    Тем легче нравимся мы ей.
    И тем ее вернее губим.
    Средь обольстительных сетей.
    • The less we love a woman the easier 'tis to be liked by her, and thus more surely we undo her amid seductive toils.
    • Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (1833; rev. 1837), ch. 4, st. 1 (tr. Vladimir Nabokov, 1964)

Q

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  • Like to the falling of a star,
    * * * *
    Like to the damask rose you see,
    Or like the blossom on the tree.
    • Francis Quarles, Argalus and Parthenia (1629). Claimed by him but attributed to John Phillipot (Philpott) in Harleian Manuscript, 3917, fol. 88 b., a fragment written about the time of James I. Credited to Simon Wastell (1629) by Mackay, as it is appended to his Microbiblion. Said to be an imitation of an earlier poem by Bishop Henry King. Reported in Hoyt's (1922), p. 893
  • Quien no ama con todos sus cinco sentidos una mujer hermosa, no estima á la naturaleza su mayor cuidado y su mayor obra.
    • He who loves not a beautiful woman with all his five senses esteems not nature in its greatest care and its highest achievement.
    • Francisco de Quevedo, El Mundo por de Dentro, in Sueños y Discursos (1627), sec. 4 (tr. Harbottle and Hume, 1907)
  • Las mujeres no quieren en un hombre sino que otorgue; supuesto que ellas piden siempre.
    • Women only want a man to grant; for of course they always ask.
    • Francisco de Quevedo, La Visita de los Chistes, in Juguetes de la niñez (1631), sec. 5 (tr. Harbottle and Hume, 1907)

R

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I am woman, hear me roar.
—Helen Reddy
  • If she undervalue me,
    What care I how fair she be?
  • A saint does not look at women with the eye of desire; if he comes near a woman, he sees the Divine Mother in her and worships her.
  • Shepherd: Men are more eloquent then women made:
    Nymph: But women are more powerfull to persuade.
  • Like tapers on the altar shine her eyes;
    Her breath is the perfume of sacrifice.
    • Thomas Randolph, "An Elegy"; Poems, &c. (1638)
  • I have defined Ladies as people who did not do things themselves. Aunt Etty was most emphatically such a person.
  • Prés du sexe tu vins, tu vis, et tu vainquis:
    Que ton sort est heureux! Allons, saute Marquis!
    • You come near the sex, see, and conquer—my boy!
      You're the luckiest of mortals! Jump, marquis, for joy!
    • Jean-François Regnard, Le Joueur (1696), 4, 10. Reported in King (1904), p. 12, no. 89
  • De Carlos el Rey es hija,
    Mas es muger, y ha mas años
    La mudanza en las mugeres,
    Que no la nobleza en Carlos.
    • Daughter she is, 'tis true, of Charles the King,
      But she is woman, and in womankind
      Hath fickleness for far more years held sway
      Than Charles can count of noble ancestry.
    • Miguel Sánchez Requejo, Don Gayferos (tr. Harbottle and Hume, 1907)
  • Las mujeres son espejo
    Que viendo vuestro retrato,
    Si os descuidais y otro llega,
    Hará con él otro tanto.
    • Women, like mirrors, may reflect,
      Perchance your very face;
      If you the compliment neglect,
      Another takes your place.
    • Miguel Sánchez Requejo, Don Gayferos (tr. Harbottle and Hume, 1907)
 
A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.
—Revelation
  • And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars: And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.
  • And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne.
  • That, let us rail at women, scorn and flout 'em,
    We may live with, but cannot live without 'em.
  • Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake,
    heavy with useless experience, rich
    with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
    crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
    of mere fact.
    • Adrienne Rich, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), title poem, pt. 1, st. 2
  • A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
    The beak that grips her, she becomes.
    • Adrienne Rich, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), title poem, pt. 3, st. 1
  • Such a plot must have a woman in it.
  • A woman is the most inconsistent compound of obstinacy and self-sacrifice that I am acquainted with.
  • Love a woman? You're an ass!
       'Tis a most insipid passion
    To choose out for your happiness
       The silliest part of God's creation.
  • Angels listen when she speaks;
    She's my delight, all mankind's wonder;
    But my jealous heart would break
    Should we live one day asunder.
    • John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, "Song: My Dear Mistress has a Heart", st. 2
    • Vivian de Sola Pinto (ed.) Poems by John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, 2nd ed. (Harvard UP, 1964), p. 35
  • You can fuck a woman with a diamond dick and make her cum ten times, and she'll still complain. "Why did you make me cum so hard? This diamond dick is cloudy, why didn't you go to Tiffany's?"
 
Where women are revered and safeguarded, prosperity reigns and the gods rejoice.
  • Woman must raise herself to such a degree, spiritually, morally and intellectually, that it will enable her to carry man with her. ... She must become not only an equal cooperator in the management of the whole life, but also an inspirer. The greatest task is to spiritualize and to restore the health of humanity by filling it with aspiration toward great deeds and beauty. But woman must first of all change herself!
    • Helena Roerich, Letter (17 August 1934), in Letters of Helena Roerich, vol. 1 (1954), p. 276
  • There exists a most ancient saying, "Where women are revered and safeguarded, prosperity reigns and the gods rejoice."
    • Helena Roerich, Letter (5 April 1938), in Letters of Helena Roerich, vol. 2 (1967), p. 455
  • I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
    When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
    Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
    The shapes a bright container can contain!
  • I remember when OB tampons came out and you could hold them in your hand, and I'd walk down the hall holding my little OB tampon and I thought, "If I open my hand and show this to anybody, the whole building is going to explode."
  • C'est chose qui moult me deplaist,
    Quand poule parle et coq se taist.
    • It is a thing very displeasing to me when the hen speaks and the cock is silent.
    • Roman de la Rose (14th century). Reported in Hoyt's (1922), p. 893
  • ... there will be a woman President some day, but that day is not yet here. We women still have to prove ourselves, and at the present moment I do not think the country as a whole would have enough confidence in a woman, and without that confidence and cooperation she could not do a good job. Before we have a woman President we will have to have more women Governors of the States, more women in the Senate, and in Congress. The women who have served in those capacities have done good jobs, but they are far too few to create the confidence necessary
  • In those rare individual cases where women approach genius they also approach masculinity.
    • Waverley Root, "Women are Intellectually Inferior", in The American Mercury, vol. 69 (July–December 1949), p. 410
  • The blessed damozel leaned out
       From the gold bar of Heaven;
    Her eyes were deeper than the depth
       Of waters stilled at even;
    She had three lilies in her hand,
       And the stars in her hair were seven.
  • Of Adam's first wife, Lilith, it is told
    (The witch he loved before the gift of Eve)
    That ere the snakes, her sweet tongue could deceive
    And her enchanted hair was the first gold—
    And still she sits, young while the earth is old
    And, subtly of herself contemplative,
    Draws men to watch the bright net she can weave,
    Till heart and body and life are in its hold.
    • Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Body's Beauty", Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition (1868)
  • Le monde est le livre des femmes.
    • The world is the book of women.
    • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile: or, On Education (1762), bk. 1
  • Toute fille lettrée restera fille toute sa vie, quand il n'y aura que des hommes sensés sur la terre.
    • Every blue-stocking will remain a spinster as long as there are sensible men on the earth.
    • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile: or, On Education (1762), bk. 5
  • Une femme bel-esprit est le fléau de son mari, de ses enfants, de ses amis, de ses valets, de tout le monde.
    • A blue-stocking is the scourge of her husband, children, friends, servants, and every one.
    • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile: or, On Education (1762), bk. 5
  • And one false step entirely damns her fame.
    In vain with tears the loss she may deplore,
    In vain look back on what she was before;
    She sets like stars that fall, to rise no more.
  • Beshrew my heart, but it is wond’rous strange;
    Sure there is something more than witchcraft in them,
    That masters ev’n the wisest of us all.
    • Nicholas Rowe, Jane Shore (1714), act 4, sc. 1
  • Women, like summer storms, awhile are cloudy,
    Burst out in thunder and impetuous showers:
    But straight the sun of beauty dawns abroad,
    And all the fair horizon is serene.
    • Nicholas Rowe, Tamerlane (1701), act 5, sc. 1
  • Not only am I scared of big, strong men, I'm scared of mean little women. It's just little skinny men and nice big women that I get along with.
  • I was no better than some geek with a foam-rubber woman's torso like they advertise in Hustler. What a pathetic, twisted version of womanhood: all the "inessential" parts lopped off, nothing left behind but tits and ass and holes. Lifelike washable plastic skin. Greek and French features. But yet, in a way, wasn't the sex sphere always what I'd wanted in a woman? An ugly truth there. "Shut up and spread!" How many times had I told Sybil that, if not in so many words?
    • Rudy Rucker, The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 69
  • Μισῶ τὴν ἀφελῆ͵ μισῶ τὴν σώφρονα λίαν·
    ἡ μὲν γὰρ βραδέως͵ ἡ δὲ θέλει ταχέως.
    • I dislike a woman who is too facile and I dislike one who is too prudish. The one consents too quickly, the other too slowly.
    • Rufinus, in the Greek Anthology, bk. 5, no. 42 (tr. W. R. Paton, 1916)
  • Εἰ τοίην χάριν εἶχε γυνὴ μετὰ Κύπριδος εὐνήν,
    οὐκ ἄν τοι κόρον ἔσχεν ἀνὴρ ἀλόχοισιν ὁμιλῶν.
    πᾶσαι γὰρ μετὰ κύπριν ἀτερπέες εἰσὶ γυναῖκες.
    • If women had as much charm when all is over as before, men would never tire of intercourse with their wives, but all women are displeasing then.
    • Rufinus, in the Greek Anthology, bk. 5, no. 77 (tr. W. R. Paton, 1916)
  • And behind every man who's a failure there's a woman, too!
  • Do son todas mugeres, nunca mengua renzilla.
    • Where there are only women, there is never a lull in the squabbling.
    • Juan Ruiz, El Libro de buen amor (1330; rev. 1343), st. 757 (tr. Philip O. Gericke, 1992)
  • Woman is a ray of God, not a mere mistress,
    The Creator's self, as it were, not a mere creature!
  • Queens you must always be: queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and your sons, queens of higher mystery to the world beyond. ... But, alas! you are too often idle and careless queens, grasping at majesty in the least things, while you abdicate it in the greatest.
  • The superior virtue of women was made a reason for keeping them out of politics, where, it was held, a lofty virtue is impossible. But the early feminists turned the argument round, and contended that the participation of women would ennoble politics. Since this has turned out to be an illusion, there has been less talk of women's superior virtue, but there are still a number of men who adhere to the monkish view of woman as the temptress. Women themselves, for the most part, think of themselves as the sensible sex, whose business it is to undo the harm that comes of men's impetuous follies. For my part I distrust all generalizations about women, favourable and unfavourable, masculine and feminine, ancient and modern; all alike, I should say, result from paucity of experience.
  • Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.
  • O, saw ye the lass wi' the bonnie blue een?
    Her smile is the sweetest that ever was seen,
    Her cheek like the rose is, but fresher, I ween,
    She's the loveliest lassie that trips on the green.

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Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. —Shakespeare
  • That woman, as nature has created her and as man is at present educating her, is his enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. This she can become only when she has the same rights as he, and is his equal in education and work.
  • Eve, smiling, plucked the apple, then
    Laughed, sighed—and tasted it again:
    "Strange such a pleasant, juicy thing
    On a forbidden tree should spring!"
    But had she seen with clearer eyes,
    Or had the serpent been less wise,
    She'd scarce have shown such little wit
    As to let Adam taste of it!
  • How shall I free myself from this marble envelope which grips me round the knees, and holds me as totally imprisoned as a corpse by its tomb?
  • Where love is absent there can be no woman.
    • George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin), Lélia (1833), vol. 1, pp. 104–5. Reported in Maurois (1954), p. 122
  • Ne l'onde solca, e ne l'arena semina,
    E'l vago vento spera in rete accogliere
    Chi sue speranze fonda in cor di femina.
    • He ploughs the waves, sows the sand, and hopes to gather the wind in a net, who places his hopes on the heart of woman.
    • Jacopo Sannazaro, Ecloga Octava; "Plough the sands" found in Juvenal, Satires, no. 7. Jeremy Taylor, Discourse on Liberty of Prophesying (1647), introduction
  • Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough,
    A-top on the topmost twig,—which the pluckers forgot, somehow,—
    Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now.
    * * *
    Like the wild hyacinth flower, which on the hills is found,
    Which the passing feet of the shepherds for ever tear and wound,
    Until the purple blossom is trodden into the ground.
    • Sappho, Fragments 105a (Scholiast on Hermogenes, Kinds of Style, 1, 1) and 105b (Demetrius, On Style, 146), tr. D. G. Rossetti, "One Girl (Beauty)", in Poems (1870; 1881)
  • Such, Polly, are your sex—part truth, part fiction;
    Some thought, much whim, and all a contradiction.
  • Ehret die Frauen! sie flechten und weben
    Himmlische Rosen in's irdische Leben.
    • Honor women! they entwine and weave heavenly roses in our earthly life.
    • Friedrich Schiller, Würde der Frauen (1796). Reported in Hoyt's (1922), p. 894
  • Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. If they’re feminine, they’re not ideal, and if ideal, not feminine.
  • The weakness of their reasoning faculty...explains why women show more sympathy for the unfortunate than men do, and so treat them with more kindness and interest; and why it is that, on the contrary, they are inferior to men in point of justice, and less honorable and conscientious.
  • The fundamental fault of the female character is that it has no sense of justice. This is mainly due to the fact...that women are defective in the powers of reasoning and deliberation; but it is also traceable to the position which Nature has assigned to them as the weaker sex. They are dependent, not upon strength, but upon craft; and hence their instinctive capacity for cunning, and their ineradicable tendency to say what is not true. For as lions are provided with claws and teeth, and elephants and boars with tusks, bulls with horns, and cuttle fish with its clouds of inky fluid, so Nature has equipped woman, for her defense and protection, with the arts of dissimulation.
  • Woman's faith, and woman's trust,
    Write the characters in dust.
  • Widowed wife and wedded maid.
  • O Woman! in our hours of ease,
    Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,
    And variable as the shade
    By the light quivering aspen made;
    When pain and anguish wring the brow,
    A ministering angel thou!
  • A woman's notes will not signify much truly, no more than her tongue.
  • Women had prerogative in deliberative sessions touching either peace-government, or martial affairs.
    • On the custom of the ancient Britons; Selden's Works, vol. 3, p. 10, cited in Chorlton v. Lings (1868), L.R. 4 C.P. 389
  • I have gone out, a possessed witch,
    haunting the black air, braver at night;
    dreaming evil, ...
    A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
    I have been her kind.
  • Now boast thee, death, in thy possession lies
    A lass unparalleled.
    • William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, act 5, sc. 2
 
If ladies be but young and fair,
They have the gift to know it.
—Shakespeare
  • If ladies be but young and fair,
    They have the gift to know it.
    • William Shakespeare, As You Like It (c.1599-1600), act 2, sc. 7, l. 37
  • Run, run, Orlando: carve on every tree
    The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she.
    • William Shakespeare, As You Like It (c. 1599–1600), act 3, sc. 2, l. 9
  • I thank God I am not a woman, to be touched with so many giddy offences as He hath generally taxed their whole sex withal.
    • William Shakespeare, As You Like It (c. 1599–1600), act 3, sc. 2, l. 366
  • Is there no way for men to be, but women
    Must be half-workers?
    • William Shakespeare, Cymbeline (1611), act 2, sc. 5, l. 1
  • O most delicate fiend!
    Who is't can read a woman?
    • William Shakespeare, Cymbeline (1611), act 5, sc. 5, l. 47
  • Frailty, thy name is woman!—
    A little month, or ere those shoes were old
    With which she follow'd my poor father's body,
    Like Niobe, all tears;—why she, even she,
    * * * married with my uncle.
    • William Shakespeare, Hamlet (c. 1600), act 1, sc. 2, l. 146
  • And is not my hostess of the tavern a most sweet wench?
    As the honey of Hybla, my old lad of the castle.
  • 'Tis beauty that doth oft make women proud;
    But, God he knows, thy share thereof is small:
    'Tis virtue that doth make them most admired;
    The contrary doth make thee wondered at:
    'Tis government that makes them seem divine.
  • Women are soft, mild, pitiful and flexible;
    Thou stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless.
    • William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 3 (c. 1591), act 1, sc. 4
  • Her sighs will make a battery in his breast;
    Her tears will pierce into a marble heart;
    The tiger will be mild whiles she doth mourn;
    And Nero will be tainted with remorse,
    To hear and see her plaints.
    • William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 3 (c. 1591), act 3, sc. 1, l. 37
  • Two women plac'd together makes cold weather.
    • William Shakespeare, Henry VIII (c. 1613), act 1, sc. 4, l. 22
  • I grant I am a woman, but withal,
    A woman that Lord Brutus took to wife:
    I grant I am a woman; but withal
    A woman well-reputed; Cato's daughter.
  • O constancy! be strong upon my side;
    Set a huge mountain ’tween my heart and tongue;
    I have a man’s mind, but a woman’s might.
    How hard it is for women to keep counsel!
    • William Shakespeare, Julius Cæsar (1599), act 2, sc. 4, l. 6 (loq. Portia)
  • Ah me, how weak a thing
    The heart of woman is!
    • William Shakespeare, Julius Cæsar (1599), act 2, sc. 4, l. 39 (loq. Portia)
  • She in beauty, education, blood,
    Holds hand with any princess of the world.
    • William Shakespeare, King John (1598), act 2, sc. 1, l. 493
  • There was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass.
    • William Shakespeare, King Lear (1608), act 3, sc. 2, l. 35
  • Proper deformity seems not in the fiend
    So horrid as in woman.
    • William Shakespeare, King Lear (1608), act 4, sc. 2
 
But to the girdle do the Gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiends’.
—Shakespeare
  • The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to’t
    With a more riotous appetite.
    Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
    Though women all above:
    But to the girdle do the Gods inherit,
    Beneath is all the fiends’.
    • William Shakespeare, King Lear (1608), act 4, sc. 6
  • Her voice was ever soft,
    Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman.
    • William Shakespeare, King Lear (1608), act 5, sc. 3
  • A child of our grandmother Eve, a female; or, for thy more sweet understanding, a woman.
  • From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
    They are the ground, the books, the academes,
    From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire.
    • William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost (c. 1595-6), act 4, sc. 3
  • From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
    They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
    They are the books, the arts, the academes,
    That show, contain, and nourish all the world.
    • William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost (c. 1595-6), act 4, sc. 3
  • What peremptory, eagle-sighted eye
    Dares look upon the heaven of her brow,
    That is not blinded by her majesty?
    • William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost (c. 1595-6), act 4, sc. 3
  • Fair ladies mask'd are roses in their bud:
    Dismask'd, their damask sweet commixture shown,
    Are angels veiling clouds, or roses blown.
    • William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost (c. 1595-6), act 5, sc. 2, l. 295
  • You should be women,
    And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
    That you are so.
    • William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1606), act 1, sc. 3, l. 39 (loq. Banquo)
  • Come, you spirits
    That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here...
    Come to my woman’s breasts,
    And take my milk for gall.
    • William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1606), act 1, sc. 5 (loq. Lady Macbeth)
  •        Women are frail too.
    Ay, as the glasses where they view themselves;
    Which are as easy broke as they make forms.
    Women! help heaven! men their creation mar
    In profiting by them.
  • We cannot fight for love, as men may do;
    We should be woo’d, and were not made to woo.
  • Would it not grieve a woman to be overmaster'd with a piece of valiant dust? to make an account of her life to a cloud of wayward marl?
  • She speaks poniards, and every word stabs: if her breath were as terrible as her terminations, there were no living near her; she would infect to the north star.
    • William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (1598-99), act 2, sc. 1, l. 255
  • One woman is fair, yet I am well; another is wise, yet I am well: another virtuous, yet I am well; but till all graces be in one woman, one woman shall not come in my grace.
    • William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (1598–99), act 2, sc. 3, l. 27
  • A maid
    That paragons description and wild fame;
    One that excels the quirks of blazoning pens,
    And in the essential vesture of creation
    Does tire the ingener.
    • William Shakespeare, Othello (c. 1603), act 2, sc. 1, l. 61 (loq. Cassio)
  • You are pictures out of doors,
    Bells in your parlours, wild-cats in your kitchens,
    Saints in your injuries, devils being offended,
    Players in your housewifery, and housewives in your beds.
    • William Shakespeare, Othello (c. 1603), act 2, sc. 1, l. 110 (loq. Iago)
  • And have not we affections,
    Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have?
    Then let them use us well: else let them know,
    The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.
    • William Shakespeare, Othello (c. 1603), act 4, sc. 3 (loq. Emilia)
  • Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature.
    • William Shakespeare, Othello (c. 1603), act 5, sc. 2 (loq. Othello)
  • Have you not heard it said full oft,
    A woman's nay doth stand for nought?
  • Think you a little din can daunt mine ears?
    Have I not in my time heard lions roar?
    * * * * * *
    Have I not heard great ordnance in the field,
    And heaven's artillery thunder in the skies?
    * * * * * *
    And do you tell me of a woman's tongue,
    That gives not half so great a blow to hear
    As will a chestnut in a farmer's fire?
  • Why, then thou canst not break her to the lute?
    Why, no; for she hath broke the lute to me.
    • William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1593-94), act 2, sc. 1, l. 148
  • Say that she rail, why then I'll tell her plain
    She sings as sweetly as a nightingale;
    Say that she frown; I'll say she looks as clear
    As morning roses newly wash'd with dew;
    Say she be mute and will not speak a word;
    Then I'll commend her volubility,
    And say she uttereth piercing eloquence.
    • William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1593-94), act 2, sc. 1, l. 171
  • A woman mov'd is like a fountain troubled,
    Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty.
    • William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1593-94), act 5, sc. 2, l. 142
  • I am ashamed that women are so simple
    To offer war where they should kneel for peace.
    • William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1593-94), act 5, sc. 2
  • Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
    Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,
    But that our soft conditions and our hearts
    Should well agree with our external parts?
    • William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1593-94), act 5, sc. 2, l. 165
  • 'Tis a good hearing, when children are toward.
    But a harsh hearing, when women are froward.
    • William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1593–94), act 5, sc. 2
  • Muse not that I thus suddenly proceed;
    For what I will, I will, and there an end.
  • To be slow in words is a woman's only virtue.
    • William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1590s), act 3, sc. 1, l. 338
  • He bears an honorable mind,
    And will not use a woman lawlessly.
    • William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1590s), act 5, sc. 3
  • Thou dotard! Thou art woman-tir’d, unroosted
    By thy Dame Partlet here.
  • If, one by one, you wedded all the world,
    Or from the all that are took something good,
    To make a perfect woman, she you kill'd
    Would be unparallel'd.
    • William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale (c. 1610–11), act 5, sc. 1, l. 13
  • Women will love her that she is a woman
    More worth than any man; men, that she is
    The rarest of all women.
    • William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale (c. 1610–11), act 5, sc. 1, l. 110
  •    Women are angels, wooing:
    Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing;
    That she beloved knows nought that knows not this:
    Men prize the thing ungained more than it is.
  • A woman impudent and mannish grown
    Is not more loath’d than an effeminate man
    In time of action.
    • William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602), act 3, sc. 3
  • Women are as roses; whose fair flower,
    Being once display’d, doth fall that very hour.
  • I wonder why we take from our women
    Why we rape our women, do we hate our women?
    I think it's time to kill for our women
    Time to heal our women, be real to our women
    And if we don't we'll have a race of babies
    That will hate the ladies that make the babies
    And since a man can't make one
    He has no right to tell a woman when and where to create one
    So will the real men get up
    I know you're fed up, ladies, but keep your head up.
  • Where there is a woman there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits.
  • In the beginning, said a Persian poet—Allah took a rose, a lily, a dove, a serpent, a little honey, a Dead Sea apple, and a handful of clay. When he looked at the amalgam—it was a woman.
  • Woman's dearest delight is to wound Man's self-conceit, though Man's dearest delight is to gratify hers.
    • Bernard Shaw, An Unsocial Socialist (wr. 1883; pub. 1887), ch. 5
  • You sometimes have to answer a woman according to her womanishness, just as you have to answer a fool according to his folly.
    • Bernard Shaw, An Unsocial Socialist (wr. 1883; pub. 1887), ch. 18
  • Women, for the sake of their children and parents, submit to slaveries and prostitutions that no unattached woman would endure.
  • The fickleness of the woman I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
  • Home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse.
  • She was an extremely attractive woman if you like the type, which could best be described as homicidal schizophrenic paranoiac with kittenish overtones.
  • One moral's plain, * * * without more fuss;
    Man's social happiness all rests on us:
    Through all the drama—whether damn'd! or not—
    Love gilds the scene, and women guide the plot.
  • Here's to the maiden of bashful fifteen
    Here's to the widow of fifty
    Here's to the flaunting, extravagant queen;
    And here's to the housewife that's thrifty.
    Let the toast pass—
    Drink to the lass—
    I'll warrant she'll prove an excuse for the glass!
  • Mobilior ventis o femina!
    • O woman more inconstant than the wind!
    • Titus Calpurnius Siculus, Ecloguae, no. 3, l. 51 (tr. J. W. and A. M. Duff, 1934)
  • Our poor eyes were so enriched as to behold, and our low hearts so exalted as to love, a maid who is such, that as the greatest thing the world can show is her beauty, so the least thing that may be praised in her is her beauty.
    • Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1593; 1621), bk. 1
  • All the cost bestowed did not so much enrich, nor all the fine decking so much beautify, nor all the dainty devices so much delight, as the fairness of Parthenia, the pearl of all the maids of Mantinea, who, as she went to the temple to be married, her eyes themselves seemed a temple wherein love and beauty were married.
    • Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1593; 1621), bk. 1
  • She is not worthy to be loved, that hath not some feeling of her own worthiness.
    • Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1593; 1621), bk. 2
  • A fair woman shall not only command without authority but persuade without speaking. She shall not need to procure attention, for their own eyes will chain their ears unto it. Men venture lives to conquer; she conquers lives without venturing.
    • Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1593; 1621), bk. 3
  • It is against womanhood, to be forward in their own wishes.
    • Sir Philip Sidney, in Jane Porter, Aphorisms of Sir Philip Sidney; with Remarks (1807), vol. 2, p. 74
  • Woman was formed to admire, man to be admirable. His are the glories of the sun at noon-day; hers the softened splendour of the midnight moon.
    • Sir Philip Sidney, in Porter (1807), vol. 2, p. 125
  • Lor', but women's rum cattle to deal with, the first man found that to his cost,
    And I reckon it's just through a woman the last man on earth'll be lost.
  • She is the vyolet,
    The daysy delectable,
    The columbine commendable,
    The jelofer amyable;
    For this most goodly floure,
    This blossom of fressh colour,
    So Jupiter me succour,
    She florysheth new and new
    In beaute and vertew.
  • With solace and gladnes,
    Moche mirthe and no madnes,
    All good and no badnes,
    So joyously,
    So maydenly,
    So womanly
    Her demenying
    In every thynge.
  • Far may be sought
    Erst that ye can fynde
    So corteise, so kynde
    As mirry Margarete,
    This midsomer flowre,
    Jentyll as fawcoun
    Or hawke of the towre.
    • John Skelton, "To maystres Margaret Hussey"
  • By saynt Mary, my lady,
    Your mammy and your dady
    Brought forth a godely babi!
    • John Skelton, "To maystres Isabell Pennell"
    • Alexander Dyce (ed.) The Poetical Works of John Skelton, 2 vols. (1843)
  • If we are to use the women for the same things as the men, we must also teach them the same things.
  • Ha belle blonde
    Au cors si gent
    Perle du monde
    Que j'aime tant!
    • Ah! beauteous maid,
        Of form so fair!
      Pearl of the world,
        Beloved and dear!
    • Raoul de Soissons (tr. Edgar Taylor, 1825)
 
I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.
—Song of Songs
  • Γύναι, γυναιξὶ κόσμον ἡ σιγὴ φέρει.
  • Νῦν δ' οὐδέν εἰμι χωρίς.
  • What wilt not woman, gentle woman, dare
    When strong affection stirs her spirit up?
 
We are... infinitely superior to men, and if we were free and developed, healthy in body and mind, as we should be under natural conditions, our motherhood would be our glory.
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton
  • The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. ... He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective to the franchise. He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice. ... Having deprived her of this first right as a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides. He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
  • We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.
  • Women's degradation is in man's idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man. Come what will, my whole soul rejoices in the truth that I have uttered.
    • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Letter to Susan B. Anthony (14 June 1860), in T. Stanton and H. Stanton Blaher (eds.) Elizabeth Cady Stanton, vol. 2 (1922), p. 82
  • The craft is only one path among the many opening up for women, and many of us will blaze new trails as we explore the uncharted country of our own interiors. The heritage, the culture, the knowledge of the ancient priestesses, healers, poets, singers, and seers were nearly lost, but a seed survived the flames that will blossom in a new age into thousands of flowers. The long sleep of Mother Goddess is ended. May She awaken in each of our hearts.
    • Starhawk (Miriam Simos), "Witchcraft and Women's Culture", in Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (eds.) Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (1979), p. 26
  • He beheld his own rougher make softened into sweetness, and tempered with smiles; he saw a creature who had, as it were, Heaven's second thought in her formation.
    • Richard Steele, The Christian Hero (1701), of Adam awaking, and first seeing Eve
  • Will Honeycomb calls these over-offended ladies the outrageously virtuous.
  • Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke; that's their natural and first weapon. She will need sisterhood.
  • She is no worthy woman who forsakes her honour for her body, or her body for her honour.
  • Where a woman has loved most, there she will soonest avenge herself.
  • In woman I sought an angel, who could lend me wings, and I fell into the arms of an earth-spirit, who suffocated me under mattresses stuffed with the feathers of wings! I sought an Ariel and I found a Caliban; when I wanted to rise she dragged me down; and continually reminded me of the fall....
  • Every healthy man is a woman-hater—yet he cannot survive if he does not ally himself with his enemy and bring about strife. All deviates and effeminate perverts among men have an adoration for women!
    • August Strindberg, To Damascus, pt. 3 (1904), act 2 (tr. Arvid Paulson, 1972)
  • The beginning and the end—for us men anyhow. In relationship to one another they are nothing.
    • August Strindberg, To Damascus, pt. 3 (1904), act 3, sc. 2 (tr. Graham Rawson, 1939)
  • Nothing in themselves; but everything for us, through us! Our honour and our shame; our greatest joy, our deepest pain; our redemption and our fall; our wages and our punishment; our strength and our weakness.
    • August Strindberg, To Damascus, pt. 3 (1904), act 3, sc. 2 (tr. Graham Rawson, 1939)
  • Perhaps some sort of larva, or pupa, out of whose somnambulist life a man will be created. She is like a child, yet is not one; she is a sort of child, but is not like one. When the man pulls upward, she drags downward; when the man drags downward, she pulls upward!
    • August Strindberg, To Damascus, pt. 3 (1904), act 3, sc. 3 (tr. Arvid Paulson, 1972)
  • "To love" is an active verb, and "woman" is a passive noun. He loves—she is loved; he interrogates—she merely answers!
    • August Strindberg, To Damascus, pt. 3 (1904), act 3, sc. 3 (tr. Arvid Paulson, 1972)
  • I saw fair Chloris walk alone,
    When feather'd rain came softly down,
    As Jove descending from his Tower
    To court her in a silver shower:
    The wanton snow flew to her breast,
    Like pretty birds into their nest,
    But, overcome with whiteness there,
    For grief it thaw'd into a tear:
       Thence falling on her garments' hem,
       To deck her, froze into a gem.
    • William Strode, "Chloris in the Snow", in Q's OBEV, 1st ed. (1900), no. 393
  • She is pretty to walk with,
    And witty to talk with,
    And pleasant too, to think on.
  • If of herself she will not love,
    Nothing can make her:
    The devil take her!
    • Sir John Suckling, "Song", in Aglaura (1638); Fragmenta Aurea (1646)
  • Women never look so well as when one comes in wet and dirty from hunting.
  • The one thing that made her content to be a woman was that she would never have to marry one.
    • R. S. Surtees, Mr Facey Romford's Hounds (1865), ch. 40
  • She was one of those languid women made of dark honey, smooth and sweet and terribly sticky, who take control of a room with a syrupy gesture, a toss of the hair, a single slow whiplash of the eyes—and all the while remain as still as the center of a hurricane, apparently unaware of the force of gravity by which they irresistibly attract to themselves the yearnings and the souls of both men and women.
  • Rainy and rough sets the day,—
       There's a heart beating for somebody;
    I must be up and away,—
       Somebody's anxious for somebody.
    Thrice hath she been to the gate,—
       Thrice hath she listen'd for somebody;
    'Midst the night, stormy and late,
       Somebody's waiting for somebody.
  • Une femme qui n'a pas été jolie n'a pas été jeune.
    • A woman who has not been pretty has never been young.
    • Sophie Swetchine, Airelles, 125. Reported in King (1904), p. 359, no. 2824
  • Daphne knows, with equal ease,
    How to vex and how to please;
    But the folly of her sex
    Makes her sole delight to vex.
  • Lose no time to contradict her,
    Nor endeavour to convict her;
    Only take this rule along,
    Always to advise her wrong,
    And reprove her when she's right;
    She may then crow wise for spite.
    • Jonathan Swift, "Daphne"
    • The Poems of Jonathan Swift, vol. 2 (London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1910)
  • Sheperd: Thanks, gentle Echo, right thy answers tell,
    What woman is, and how to guard her well.
    Echo: Guard her well.
    • Jonathan Swift, "A Gentle Echo on Woman"; Miscellanies, vol. 2 (1728), p. 282
  • Aperte mala quum est mulier, tum demum est bona.
    • When a woman is openly bad, then at least she is honest.
    • Publilius Syrus, 20. Reported in King (1904), p. 18, no. 138
  • Aut amat, aut odit mulier, nihil est tertium.
    • A woman either loves or hates; there is no medium.
    • Publilius Syrus, 6. Reported in King (1904), p. 25, no. 190

T

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  • Neque fœmina, amissa pudicitia, alia abnuerit.
    • Once a woman has lost her chastity, she will refuse nothing.
    • Tacitus, Annales, bk. 4, ch. 3. Reported in King (1904), p. 216, no. 1670
  • O Woman, you are not merely the handiwork of God, but also of men; these are ever endowing you with beauty from their own hearts. ... You are one-half woman and one-half dream.
  • Femmina è cosa garrula e fallace:
    Vuole e disvuole, è folle uom chi sen fida,
    Si tra se volge.
    • Women have tongues of craft, and hearts of guile,
      They will, they will not; fools that on them trust;
      For in their speech is death, hell in their smile.
    • Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme (1581), bk. 19, st. 84. Tr. Edward Fairfax (1600)
  • All virtuous women, like tortoises, carry their house on their heads, and their chappel in their heart, and their danger in their eye, and their souls in their hands, and God in all their actions.
    • Jeremy Taylor, Life of Christ (1649), pt. 1, sec. 2, par. 4
    • The Whole Works of Jeremy Taylor, vol. 2 (London: Ogle, Duncan, and Co., 1822), p. 13
 
A woman's honor rests on manly love. —Esaias Tegnér
  • A woman's honor rests on manly love.
  • Woman is the lesser man.
  • With prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans,
    And sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair.
  • A rosebud set with little wilful thorns,
    And sweet as English air could make her, she.
    • Alfred Tennyson, The Princess (1847), prologue, l. 153
  • The woman is so hard
    Upon the woman.
    • Alfred Tennyson, The Princess (1847), VI
  • For woman is not undeveloped man
    But diverse; could we make her as the man
    Sweet love were slain; his dearest bond is this
    Not like to like but like in difference.
    • Alfred Tennyson, The Princess (1847), VII
  • Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls.
  • For men at most differ as Heaven and Earth,
    But women, worst and best, as Heaven and Hell.
  • She with all the charm of woman,
    She with all the breadth of man.
    • Alfred Tennyson, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886), l. 48
  • Novi ingenium mulierum;
    Nolunt ubi velis, ubi nolis cupiunt ultro.
    • I know the nature of women. When you will, they will not; when you will not, they come of their own accord.
    • Terence, Eunuchus, act 4, sc. 7. l. 42. Reported in Hoyt's (1922), p. 896
  • Et Euam te esse nescis? Viuit sententia Dei super sexum istum in hoc saeculo: uiuat et reatus necesse est. Tu es diaboli ianua; tu es arboris illius resignatrix; tu es diuinae legis prima desertrix; tu es quae eum suasisti, quem diabolus aggredi non ualuit; tu imaginem Dei, hominem, tam facile elisisti; propter tuum meritum, id est mortem, etiam filius Dei mori habuit: et adornari tibi in mente est super pelliceas tuas tunicas?
    • And do you not know that you are [each] an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that [forbidden] tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert—that is, death—even the Son of God had to die. And do you think about adorning yourself over and above your tunics of skins?
    • Tertullian, De cultu feminarum, bk. 1, ch. 1 (tr. S. Thelwall, 1869)
  • Habitus feminae duplicem speciem circumfert, cultum et ornatum. ... Alteri ambitionis crimen intendimus, alteri prostitutionis.
    • A woman’s appearance depends upon two things; the clothes she wears, and the time she gives to her toilet. ... Against the first we bring the charge of ostentation, against the second of harlotry.
    • Tertullian, De cultu feminarum, bk. 1, ch. 4 (tr. F. A. Wright, 1928)
  • When I say that I know women, I mean that I know that I don't know them. Every single woman I ever knew is a puzzle to me, as I have no doubt she is to herself.
  • Since the days of Adam, there has been hardly a mischief done in this world but a woman has been at the bottom of it.
  • In describing this syren, singing and smiling, coaxing and cajoling, the author, with modest pride, asks his readers all around, has he once forgotten the laws of politeness, and showed the monster's hideous tale above water? No! Those who like may peep down under waves that are pretty transparent, and see it writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or curling round corpses; but above the water-line, I ask, has not everything been proper, agreeable, and decorous...?
    • William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848), p. 577
  • Πάντα γυναῖκες ἴσαντι, καὶ ὡς Ζεὺς ἠγάγεθ᾽ ῞Ηρην.
 
I tell you, it's a whole different sex!
  • She wasn't much over five feet and a hundred pounds, and she looked a little scrawny around the neck and ankles. But that was all right. It was perfectly all right. The good Lord had known just where to put that flesh where it would really do some good.
  • Women bear crosses better than men do, but they bear surprises worse.
    • Hester Thrale (Piozzi), Letter to Sir James Fellowes (6 November 1817); A. Hayward (ed.) Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains, 2nd ed. (London, 1861), vol. 2, p. 385
  • Somebody has said that Woman’s place is in the wrong. That's fine. What the wrong needs is a woman’s presence and a woman’s touch. She is far better equipped than men to set it right.
  • The man that lays his hand upon a woman,
    Save in the way of kindness, is a wretch
    Whom 'twere gross flattery to name a coward.
 
Oft it may chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know. —Tolkien
  • Regard the society of women as a necessary unpleasantness of social life, and avoid it as much as possible.
  • Woman is more impressionable than man. Therefore in the Golden Age they were better than men. Now they are worse.
    • Leo Tolstoy, Diary entry
    • Reported in Hoyt's (1922), p. 896
  • Men byhove to take hede of maydens: for they ben hote & tendre of complexion; smale, pliaunt and fayre of disposicion of body; shamfaste, ferdefull and mery touchynge the affeccion of the mynde. Touchinge outwarde disposicion they be well nurtured, demure and softe of speche and well ware what they say: and delycate in theyr apparell. ... Their hondes and the uttermeste party of their membres ben full subtyll and plyaunt, theyr voyce small, theyr speche easy and shorte, lyght in goynge & shorte steppes, and lyght wit and heed; they ben sone angry, and they ben mercyable and envyous, bytter, gylefull, able to lerne. ... And for a woman is more meker than a man, she wepeth soner, and is more envyousse, and more laughinge, & lovinge, and the malice of the soule is more in a woman than in a man. And she is of feble kinde, and she makith more lesynges, and is more shamefaste, & more slowe in werkynge and in mevynge than is a man.
    • John Trevisa, translation of Bartholomew de Glanville's De Proprietatibus Rerum, bk. 6, ch. 7
  • With many women I doubt whether there be any more effectual way of touching their hearts than ill-using them and then confessing it. If you wish to get the sweetest fragrance from the herb at your feet, tread on it and bruise it.
  • Feme qui se bouche abandone
    Le sorplus molt de legier done.
    • A woman who freely surrenders her lips gives the rest very readily.
    • Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval ou Le Conte du Graal, l. 3860 (tr. D. D. R. Owen, 1986)
  • I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab 'em by the pussy.
  • God created his marvelous world in a week.
    A woman is a hundred worlds. With one breath,
    How can I become a woman in just one day?
    Yesterday a hussar—in spurs and sword.
    Today, a lace and satin angel.
    And tomorrow, perhaps, who knows?
  • She hated the calendar, hated the mirror and what it showed her every morning. A handsome woman, that's what you are. She would almost rather have been ugly. Then she wouldn't have to remember the beauty she had been not so long ago.

U

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  • As the kynde of women is naturally geuen to the vyce of muche bablynge there is nothyng wherein theyr womanlynesse is more honestlie garnyshed than with sylence.
  • All the charity of a woman, all the good she can do, the alms she gives, comes from her feeling herself a mother. And it was with the souls of mothers that the whores asked Don Quixote if he wanted something to eat. Behold, then, how his madness converted them into maidens; for all women, when they feel themselves mothers, are turned into maidens.
    • Miguel de Unamuno, Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905), pt. 1 (tr. Anthony Kerrigan, 1967)
  • Even in the purest realm of the spirit, without the shadow of any vice, man seeks support in woman, as Francis of Assisi did in Clare.
    • Miguel de Unamuno, Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905), pt. 1 (tr. Anthony Kerrigan, 1967)
  • Through her, through your Aldonza, through women you will see into the entire universe.
    • Miguel de Unamuno, Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905), pt. 2 (tr. Anthony Kerrigan, 1967)
  • Woman yields herself to the lover because she feels that his desire makes him suffer. Isabel had compassion upon Lorenzo, Juliet upon Romeo, Francesca upon Paolo. Woman seems to say: "Come, poor one, thou shalt not suffer so for my sake!" And therefore is her love more loving and purer than that of man, braver and more enduring.
    • Miguel de Unamuno, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (1913), ch. 7 (tr. J. E. Crawford Flitch, 1921)

V

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The husband enhances the beauty of a woman more than her ornaments. —Valmiki
  • She was lovely like an indistinct lunar disc, like a streak of gold covered with dust, like a golden reed broken by the wind, like a scar left by an arrow!
  • The husband enhances the beauty of a woman more than her ornaments.
    • Valmiki, Ramayana, bk. 5, ch. 16, v. 26 (tr. Makhan Lal Sen); cf. Cornelia
  • Shariputra, who is not a woman, appears in a woman's body. And the same is true of all women — though they appear in women's bodies, they are not women. Therefore the Buddha teaches that all phenomena are neither male nor female.
  • A slighted woman knows no bounds.
  • As if a woman of education bought things because she wanted 'em.
  • Let our weakness be what it will, mankind will still be weaker; and whilst there is a world, 'tis woman that will govern it.
  • (Pero) en siendo mujeres, sean morenas,
    Sean blancas, ó no, todas son buenas.
    • But being women, it is understood
      That be they fair or dark, they all are good.
    • Lope de Vega, Las Bizarrías de Belisa (1634), act 1, sc. 3 — loq. Tello (tr. Harbottle and Hume, 1907)
  • D'aisso's fa be femna parer
    Ma domna, per qu'e·lh o retrai,
    Car no vol so c'om deu voler,
    E so c'om li deveda, fai.
  • Cette femme a fait comme Troie:
    De braves gens sans aucun fruit
    Furent dix ans à cette proie
    Un cheval n'y fut qu'une nuit.
 
A woman is always changeable and capricious. —Virgil
  • Dux femina facti.
    • A woman was leader in the deed.
    • Virgil, Æneid (29-19 BC), bk. 1, l. 364
  •    Varium et mutabile semper,
    Femina.
    • A woman is always changeable and capricious.
    • Virgil, Æneid (29-19 BC), bk. 4, l. 569
  • Furens quid fœmina possit.
    • That which an enraged woman can accomplish.
    • Virgil, Æneid (29-19 BC), bk. 5, l. 6
 
The bird of the spirit of Humanity cannot fly with only one wing. —Swami Vivekananda
  • The bird of the spirit of Humanity cannot fly with only one wing.
    • Swami Vivekananda, quoted by Helena Roerich, Letter (10 October 1934); Letters, vol. 1 (1954), p. 276
  • All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women.
    • Voltaire. Reported in Hoyt's (1922), p. 897
  • "Woman" must ever be a woman's highest name,
    And honors more than "Lady," if I know right.
  • Every greedy, unreasonable dream I’d ever had about what a woman should be came true in Mona. There, God love her warm and creamy soul, was peace and plenty forever.
  • It is the highest and eternal duty of women,—namely to sacrifice their lives and to seek the good of their husbands.

W

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Not from his head was woman took,
As made her husband to o'erlook;
Not from his feet, as one designed
The footstool of the stronger kind;
But fashioned for himself, a bride;
An equal, taken from his side.
—Charles Wesley
  • Too solemn for day, too sweet for night,
      Come not in darkness, come not in light;
    But come in some twilight interim,
      When the gloom is soft, and the light is dim.
  • My wife is one of the best wimin on this Continent, altho' she isn't always gentle as a lamb with mint sauce.
  • She is not old, she is not young,
    The Woman with the Serpent's Tongue.
    The haggard cheek, the hungering eye,
    The poisoned words that wildly fly,
    The famished face, the fevered hand—
    Who slights the worthiest in the land,
    Sneers at the just, contemns the brave,
    And blackens goodness in its grave.
  • I will not stand for being called a woman in my own house.
  • Ferdinand: And women like that part which, like the lamprey,
    Hath never a bone in’t.
    Duchess: Fie, sir!
    Ferdinand: Nay,
    I mean the tongue; variety of courtship:
    What cannot a neat knave with a smooth tale
    Make a woman believe?
  • The countess Godiva, ... longing to free the town of Coventry from the oppression of a heavy toll, ... besought her husband, that ... he would free the town from that service, and from all other heavy burdens; and when the earl sharply rebuked her for foolishly asking what was so much to his damage, and always forbade her ever more to speak to him on the subject; and while she, on the other hand, with a woman's pertinacity, never ceased to exasperate her husband on that matter, he at last made her this answer, "Mount your horse, and ride naked, before all the people, through the market of the town, from one end to the other, and on your return you shall have your request." On which Godiva replied, "But will you give me permission, if I am willing to do it?" "I will," said he. Whereupon the countess, beloved of God, loosed her hair and let down her tresses, which covered the whole of her body like a veil, and then mounting her horse and attended by two knights, she rode through the market-place, without being seen except her fair legs; and having completed the journey, she returned with gladness to her astonished husband, and obtained of him what she had asked...
  • There’s nothing sooner dry than women’s tears.
  • Eine Frau nun sieht nie ein, daß man alles auch begründen müsse; da sie keine Kontinuität hat, empfindet sie auch kein Bedürfnis nach der logischen Stützung alles Gedachten: daher die Leichtgläubigkeit aller Weiber. ... Die Frau erbittert die Zumutung, ihr Denken von der Logik ausnahmslos abhängig zu machen. Ihr mangelt das intellektuelle Gewissen. Man könnte bei ihr von »logical insanity« sprechen.
    • A woman cannot grasp that one must act from principle; as she has no continuity she does not experience the necessity for logical support of her mental processes. Hence the ease with which women assume opinions. ... Woman resents any attempt to require from her that her thoughts should be logical. She may be regarded as "logically insane."
    • Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter (1903), ch. 6 (tr. Anonymous, 1906)
  • Natalie had left the wives and joined the women.
    • Fay Weldon, The Heart of the Country (1987), p. 51
  • Not from his head was woman took,
    As made her husband to o'erlook;
    Not from his feet, as one designed
    The footstool of the stronger kind;
    But fashioned for himself, a bride;
    An equal, taken from his side.
    • Charles Wesley, Short Hymns on Select Passages of the Holy Scriptures (1762)
  • Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone. To this end she had founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other indomitable huntresses of erudition.
  • Where women walk in public processions in the streets the same as the men,
    Where they enter the public assembly and take places the same as the men;
    Where the city of the faithfullest friends stands,
    Where the city of the cleanliness of the sexes stands,
    Where the city of the healthiest fathers stands,
    Where the city of the best-bodied mothers stands,
    There the great city stands.
  • Beware of fair and painted talk,
       Beware of flattering tongues:
    The Mermaids do pretend no good
       For all their pleasant songs.
    Some use the tears of crocodiles,
       Contrary to their heart:
    And if they cannot always weep,
       They wet their cheeks by art.
    • Isabella Whitney, "The Admonition ... to all Young Gentlewomen, &c.", sts. 4–5. The Copy of a Letter (1567)
  • As pure and sweet, her fair brow seemed—
       Eternal as the sky;
    And like the brook's low song, her voice—
       A sound which could not die.
  • Sweet promptings unto kindest deeds
       Were in her very look;
    We read her face, as one who reads
       A true and holy book.
    • John Greenleaf Whittier, "Gone", st. 8
    • Poems (Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey & Co., 1850), pp. 367–68
  • Women treat us just as humanity treats its gods. They worship us, and are always bothering us to do something for them.
    • Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
  • Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.
    • Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
  • There are only two kinds of women, the plain and the coloured.
    • Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), ch. 3. Same in Woman of No Importance, act 3
  • One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.
    • Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance (1893), act 1, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 7 (1923), p. 197. Lord Illingworth is speaking.
  • Our government should not be run like a business; it should be run like a family...In any advanced mammalian species that survives and thrives, a common characteristic is the fierce behavior of the adult female of the species when she senses a threat to her cubs. Ours are threatened now, and we need to get fierce.
    • Marianne Williamson, "If We Want a Prosperous America Tomorrow, Take Care of Our Children Today", Newsweek (23 July 2020)
  • It is a mournful thing to know that you are utterly isolated among millions of human beings; that not a drop of your blood flows in any other veins.
  • You can't sit down right,
    'Cause your jeans are too tight,
    And you're lucky it's ladies night.
    With your big empty purse,
    Every week it gets worse,
    At least your breasts cost more than hers.
  • Shall I, wasting in despair,
    Die because a woman's fair?
    Or make pale my cheeks with care
    'Cause another's rosy are?
    Be she fairer than the day,
    Or the flow'ry meads in May;
    If she be not so to me,
    What care I how fair she be?
  • I loved a lass, a fair one,
       As fair as e'er was seen;
    She was indeed a rare one,
       Another Sheba queen.
    • George Wither, "I Loved a Lass", in Hoyt's (1922), p. 390
  • There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.
  • The right Education of the Female Sex, as it is in a manner every where neglected, so it ought to be generally lamented. Most in this depraved later Age think a Woman learned and wise enough if she can distinguish her Husband's Bed from another's.
  • Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size.
    • Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929), ch. 2
  • A Creature not too bright or good
    For human nature's daily food;
    For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
    Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles.
  • And now I see with eye serene,
    The very pulse of the machine;
    A Being breathing thoughtful breath,
    A Traveller betwixt life and death;
    The reason firm, the temperate will,
    Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill.
    • William Wordsworth, "She was a Phantom of Delight"
  • A perfect Woman, nobly planned
    To warn, to comfort, and command.
    • William Wordsworth, "She was a Phantom of Delight"
  • She was a Phantom of delight
    When first she gleamed upon my sight;
    A lovely Apparition, sent
    To be a moment's ornament.
    • William Wordsworth, "She was a Phantom of Delight"
  • Thou, while thy babes around thee cling,
    Shalt show us how divine a thing
    A Woman may be made.
    • William Wordsworth, "To a Young Lady, who had been reproached for taking long Walks in the Country"
    • Poems, in Two Volumes (1807)

Y

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  •    And beautiful as sweet!
    And young as beautiful! and soft as young!
    And gay as soft! and innocent as gay.
  • As unreserved, and beauteous, as the sun,
    Through every sign of vanity they run,
    Assemblies, parks, coarse feasts in City halls,
    Lectures, and trials, plays, committees, balls,
    Wells, bedlams, executions, Smithfield scenes,
    And fortune-tellers’ caves, and lions’ dens,
    Taverns, exchanges, bridewells, drawing-rooms,
    Instalments, pillories, coronations, tombs,
    Tumblers, and funerals, puppet-shows, reviews,
    Sales, races, rabbits, and (still stranger!) pews.
    • Edward Young, Love of Fame, the Universal Passion (1727), satire 5, l. 19
  • If you resent, and wish a woman ill,
    But turn her o’er one moment to her will.
    • Edward Young, Love of Fame, the Universal Passion (1727), satire 5, l. 407
  • A shameless woman is the worst of men.
    • Edward Young, Love of Fame, the Universal Passion (1727), satire 5, l. 454
  • Women were made to give our eyes delight;
    A female sloven is an odious sight.
    • Edward Young, Love of Fame, the Universal Passion (1727), satire 6, l. 213

Z

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  • Każda kobieta to fortepian – tylko trzeba umieć grać.
  • Tout d’un coup, dans la bonne enfant, la femme se dressait, inquiétante, apportant le coup de folie de son sexe, ouvrant l’inconnu du désir. Nana souriait toujours, mais d’un sourire aigu de mangeuse d’hommes.
    • All of a sudden, in the good natured child the woman stood revealed, a disturbing woman with all the impulsive madness of her sex, opening the gates of the unknown world of desire. Nana was still smiling, but with the deadly smile of a man-eater.
    • Émile Zola, Nana (1880), ch. 1 (tr. George Holden, 1972)

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