quotations about women
For I cannot think that GOD Almighty ever made them [women] so delicate, so glorious creatures; and furnished them with such charms, so agreeable and so delightful to mankind; with souls capable of the same accomplishments with men: and all, to be only Stewards of our Houses, Cooks, and Slaves.
DANIEL DEFOE
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The Education of Women
Somehow, everyone hates to see an unusually pretty girl get married. It is like taking a bite out of a very fine-looking peach.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
To awake a woman's curiosity is to make her pliable.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
Woman! when I behold thee flippant, vain,
Inconstant, childish, proud, and full of fancies.
JOHN KEATS
"Woman! When I Behold Thee"
A man who admires a fine woman, has yet not more reason to wish himself her husband, than one who admired the Hesperian fruit, would have had to wish himself the dragon that kept it.
ALEXANDER POPE
"Thoughts on Various Subjects"
A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board.
D. H. LAWRENCE
letter to John Middleton Murry, November 27, 1913
Because a woman brought death
a bright Maiden overcame it,
and so the highest blessing
in all of creation
lies in the form of a woman,
since God has become man
in a sweet and blessed Virgin.
HILDEGARD OF BINGEN
"Quia ergo femina"
If you tell anything to a woman ... it's like putting it in the papers.
IVAN KLIMA
Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light
In oranges and women courage is often mistaken for insanity.
SALLY ROBINSON
Iron Jawed Angels
It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status.
HOWARD ZINN
A People's History of the United States
What, then, is feminine as contrasted with masculine? what is womanly as compared with manly, whether in literature or in life? Men and women have many qualities in common, and resemble more than they differ from each other. But while, speaking generally, the man's main occupations lie abroad, the woman's main occupation is at home. He has to deal with public and collective interests; she has to do with private and individual interests. We need not go so far as to say, with Kingsley, that man must work and woman must weep; but at least he has to fight and to struggle, she has to solace and to heal. Ambition, sometimes high, sometimes low, but still ambition--ambition and success are the main motives and purpose of his life. Her noblest ambition is to foster domestic happiness, to bring comfort to the afflicted, and to move with unostentatious but salutary step over the vast territory of human affection. While man busies himself with the world of politics, with the world of commerce, with the rise and fall of empires, with the fortunes and fate of humanity, woman tends the hearth, visits the sick, consoles the suffering--in a word, in all she does, fulfils the sacred offices of love.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
Women are books, and men the readers be,
Who sometimes in those books erratas see;
Yet oft the reader's raptured with each line,
Fair print and paper, fraught with sense divine;
Tho' some, neglectful, seldom care to read,
And faithful wives no more than bibles heed.
Are women books? says Hodge, then would mine were
An Almanack, to change her every year.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanack
You've heard it before, but are afraid to say it aloud for fear of sounding boastful. Southern women are prettier than others. But wait just a cotton pickin' minute. Is it true? Are we really prettier? I'll let you in on a little secret. We're not. Everyone just has that illusion because the truth is, we only try harder. Our secret weapon for loveliness, passed down by generations of Southern ladies, is our ability to make the best out of what we have, or in other words, "effort."
LESLIE ANNE TARABELLA
"Are Southern women prettier?", AL, April 3, 2017
Your anatomy is a mystery that nobody bothers explaining to us. Even when we think we have mastered one woman's body, every body is different.
CHRIS ABANI
"What Men Aren't Telling Us", O Magazine, July 2008
A high degree of intellectual refinement in the female is the surest pledge society can have for the improvement of the male.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
A woman does not spend all her time in buying things; she spends part of it in taking them back.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man's presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies.... A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. His presence may be fabricated, in the sense that he pretends to b capable of what he is not. But the pretence is always towards a power which he exercises on others. By contrast, a woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her.
JOHN BERGER
Ways of Seeing
But to proceed; as in order and place, so also in matter of her Creation, Woman far excells Man. things receive their value from the matter they are made of, and the excellent skill of their maker: Pots of common clay must not contend with China-dishes, nor pewter utensils vye dignity with those of silver.... Woman was not composed of any inanimate or vile dirt, but of a more refined and purified substance, enlivened and actuated by a Rational Soul, whose operations speak it a beam, or bright ray of Divinity.
HEINRICH CORNELIUS AGRIPPA
Female Pre-eminence, or, The Dignty and Excellency of that Sex above the Male
In the choice of a wife, we ought to make use of our ears, and not our eyes.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Some women are to be captured by storm and some taken by siege; yet if there be not a traitor in her heart that shall deliver up the garrison, thou shalt not prevail over her.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah