quotations about women
A woman's thought is endowed with incredible elasticity. When she receives a knockdown blow, she bends, seems crushed, and then renews her natural shape in a given time.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
The married woman is a slave whom one must know how to set upon a throne.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Woman is the social barometer; she is an admirably contrived instrument for gauging the defects of her generation.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke
Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.
ISADORA DUNCAN
My Life
A woman calls it giving you a piece of her mind, but our experience has been that she generally winds up by giving you the whole dad-burned thing.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs
Before marriage a woman may procure some éclat by pretending to believe in the fiction of her ascendancy; but after marriage, the worshipped beauty becomes a very plain every-day sort of person, and the poetry of the sex's power is at an end for ever!
ROBERT BELL
Marriage: A Comedy in Five Acts
The less you notice them the more they chase after you. There's something perverse about women ... they're all masochists at heart.
HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Cancer
The virtue of women is perhaps a question of temperament.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Most women bestow their favors upon men, not from Passion, but from Compassion.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
What is better than wisdom? Woman. And what is better than a good woman? Nothing.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
The Canterbury Tales
Accepting the theory that the monkey is man's ancestor, one is inclined to infer that woman, judging by the number and length of her hatpins, is a lineal descendant of the porcupine.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs
For the first time ever, women are scoring higher than men on IQ tests. Scientists say it has something to do with breast implants -- not that it makes the women smarter, it just makes the men dumber.
JAY LENO
The Tonight Show, July 19, 2012
Up to the age of thirty the face of a woman is a book written in a foreign tongue, which one may still translate in spite of all the feminisms of the idiom; but on passing her fortieth year a woman becomes an insoluble riddle; and if any one can see through an old woman, it is another old woman.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Though women appear to belong to the same species as man, they are actually quite different creatures, and these incomprehensible, insidious beings have, fantastic as it seems, always looked after me. In my case such an expression as "to be fallen for" or even "to be loved" is not in the least appropriate; perhaps it describes the situation more accurately to say that I was "looked after."
OSAMU DAZAI
No Longer Human
The sweetest music is the sound of the voice of the woman we love.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Women", Les Caractères
Lone women, like to empty houses, perish.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
Hero and Leander
What happens is that, as with drugs, he needs a stronger shot each time, and women are just women. The consumption of one woman is the consumption of all. You can't double the dose.
IAN FLEMING
attributed, The Life of Ian Fleming
Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Letters to a Young Poet
Pleasure is to a woman what the sun is to the flower: if moderately enjoyed, it beautifies, it refreshes, and it improves; if immoderately, it withers, deteriorates, and destroys. But the duties of domestic life, exercised as they must be in retirement, and calling forth all the sensibilities of the female, are perhaps as necessary to the full development of her charms, as the shade and the shower are to the rose, confirming its beauty, and increasing its fragrance.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
I ask myself what
is the sound of women? What is the word for
that still thing I have hunted inside them
for so long? Deep inside the avalanche of joy,
the thing deeper in the dark, and deeper still
in the bed where we are lost. Deeper, deeper
down where a woman's heart is holding its breath,
where something very far away in that body
is becoming something we don't have a name for.
JACK GILBERT
"Happening Apart from What's Happening Around It"