quotations about women
A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.
COCO CHANEL
The Gospel According to Coco Chanel
A woman well bred and well taught, furnished with the additional accomplishments of knowledge and behaviour, is a creature without comparison. Her society is the emblem of sublimer enjoyments, her person is angelic, and her conversation heavenly. She is all softness and sweetness, peace, love, wit, and delight. She is every way suitable to the sublimest wish, and the man that has such a one to his portion, has nothing to do but to rejoice in her, and be thankful.
DANIEL DEFOE
The Education of Women
The woman who thinks meanly of herself is any man's purchase.
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
Pamela
He who desires a lifetime of happiness with a beautiful woman desires to enjoy the taste of wine by keeping his mouth always full of it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Maxims for Revolutionists
The most important thing in knowing that women are necessary is knowing that men are necessary too.
TAMARA ANGELA GRANT
"Women Are Necessary...", Huffington Post, March 9, 2017
Everywhere there is pleasure you will find a woman in disguise.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
The original oppression of Woman was based on crude denigration. She caused Man to fall, so she became a scapegoat. No, not a scapegoat which might be blameless but a culprit richly deserving of whatever suffering Man chose thereafter to heap on her. That is Woman in the Book of Genesis. Out here, our ancestors, without the benefit of hearing about the Old Testament, made the very same story differing only in local color. At first the Sky was very close to the Earth. But every evening Woman cut off a piece of the Sky to put in her soup pot, or in another version, she repeatedly banged the top end of her pestle carelessly against the Sky whenever she pounded millet or, as in yet another rendering -- so prodigious is Man's inventiveness, she wiped her kitchen hands in the Sky's face. Whatever the detail of Woman's provocation, the Sky moved away in anger, and God with it.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Anthills of the Savannah
The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
letter to "Scottie" Fitzgerald, October 5, 1940
When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.
MARGARET ATWOOD
"Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For"
Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, February 19, 1937
When women love, they forgive everything, even our crimes; when they do not love, they cannot forgive anything, not even our virtues.
HONORE DE BALZAC
The Muse of the Department
It is not extraordinary that the extraterrestrial origin of women was a recurrent theme of science fiction.
KINGSLEY AMIS
The King's English: A Guide to Modern English Usage
For women, forming close, cooperative relationships with other women at once poses important opportunities and possible threats--including to mate retention. To maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of same-sex social relationships, we propose that women's mate guarding is functionally flexible and that women are sensitive to both interpersonal and contextual cues indicating whether other women might be likely and effective mate poachers. Here, we assess one such cue: other women's fertility. Because ovulating (i.e., high-fertility) women are both more attractive to men and also more attracted to (desirable) men, ovulating women may be perceived to pose heightened threats to other women's romantic relationships.
JAIMIA ARONA KREMS & REBECCA NEEL
The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, January 14, 2016
It took him a moment to respond to the unguarded sweetness of her smile, her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Tender Is the Night
Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such manmade crimes as "cruelty."
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Tender Is the Night
It is pointless for a woman to be young unless pretty, or to be pretty unless young.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
All the world's a stage, and it's a dead easy guess which sex has all the speaking parts.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs
Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody.
JANE AUSTEN
Mansfield Park
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
The heart of a coquette, like the tail of a lizard, always grows again after she has lost it.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust