Great English Quotes and Aphorisms on women 3 by famous writers

An aphorism is nothing else but the slightest
form of writing raised to the highest level of expressive communication. Carl William Brown

60,000 QUOTES SPIDER

QUOTES AND APHORISMS ON WOMEN 3

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later, for another thing, they die earlier.

H. L. Mencken (1880-1956, American editor, author, critic, humorist)

I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.

George Meredith (1828-1909, British author)

Aren't women prudes if they don't and prostitutes if they do?

Kate Millet (1934-, American feminist author)

Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures, and their life experiences are utterly different.

Kate Millet (1934-, American feminist author)

The great mass of women throughout history have been confined to the cultural level of animal life in providing the male with sexual outlet and exercising the animal functions of reproduction and care of the young.

Kate Millet (1934-, American feminist author)

For women there are, undoubtedly, great difficulties in the path, but so much the more to overcome. First no woman would say "I am but a woman!" But a woman! What more can you ask to be?

Maria Mitchell (1943-, Canadian singer, songwriter)

Nature has not placed us in an inferior rank to men, no more than the females of other animals, where we see no distinction of capacity. Though I am persuaded if there was a commonwealth of rational horses... it would be an established maxim amongst them that a mare could not be taught to pace.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762, British society figure, letter writer)

I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

Iris Murdoch (1919-, British novelist, philosopher)

If it weren't for women, men would still be wearing last week's socks.

Cynthia Nelms

For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, German philosopher)

If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, German philosopher)

Women are considered deep -- why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, German philosopher)

Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her.

Anais Nin (1914-1977, French-born American novelist, dancer)

Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman's attention.

Camille Paglia (1947-, American author, critic, educator)

Men are the managers of the affairs of women for that God has preferred in bounty one of them over another, and for that they have expended of their property. Righteous women are therefore obedient, guarding the secret for God's guarding. And those you fear may be rebellious admonish; banish them to their couches, and beat them.

Qur'an (Holy book)

There are always women who will take men on their own terms. If I were a man I wouldn't bother to change while there are women like that around.

Ann Oakley (1944-, British sociologist, author)

It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim.

Joyce Carol Oates (1938-, American author)

The incomprehensibleness of women is an old theory, but what is that to the curious wondering observation with which wives, mothers, and sisters watch the other unreasoning animal in those moments when he has snatched the reins out of their hands, and is not to be spoken to! It is best to let him come to, and feel his own helplessness.

Margaret Oliphant (1828-1897, British novelist, historian)

If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.

Aristotle Onassis (1906-1975, Turkish-born shipping magnate)

If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.

Camille Paglia (1947-, American author, critic, educator)

Remember the dignity of your womanhood. Do not appeal, do not beg, do not grovel. Take courage, join hands, stand beside us, fight with us.

Christabel Pankhurst

Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong, and no man ever has what he should.

Cesare Pavese (1908-1950, Italian poet, novelist, translator)

Woman -- for example, look at her case! She turns tantalizing inviting glances on you. You seize her. No sooner does she feel herself in your grasp than she closes her eyes. It is a sign of her mission, the sign by which she says to man: "Blind yourself, for I am blind."

Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936, Italian author, playwright)

Men are gentle, honest and straightforward. Women are convoluted, deceptive and dangerous.

Erin Pizzey

Most women have no characters at all.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744, British poet, critic, translator)

If man knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they'd never marry.

Henry O. Porter (1862-1910, American short-story writer)

She plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint (the universal act of woman to proclaim ownership).

Henry O. Porter (1862-1910, American short-story writer)

A woman we love rarely satisfies all our needs, and we deceive her with a woman whom we do not love.

Marcel Proust (1871-1922, French novelist)

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

Marcel Proust (1871-1922, French novelist)

Of all female qualities, a warm heart is the most valuable.

Chinese Proverb (Sayings of Chinese origin)

Women will believe any lie that is wrapped in praise.

French Proverb (Sayings of French origin)

If the wife sins, the husband is not innocent.

Italian Proverb (Sayings of Italian origin)

Because of their figure, vain women stay cold.

Japanese Proverb (Sayings of Japanese origin)

It is easier to bear a child once a year than to shave everyday.

Russian Proverb (Sayings of Russian origin)

The individual woman is required a thousand times a day to choose either to accept her appointed role and thereby rescue her good disposition out of the wreckage of her self-respect, or else follow an independent line of behavior and rescue her self-respect out of the wreckage of her good disposition.

Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973, American feminist and pacifist)

A woman is like a teabag -- only in hot water do you realize how strong she is.

Nancy Reagan (1923-, American First Lady)

Even the wisest men make fools of themselves about women, and even the most foolish women are wise about men.

Theodor Reik (1888-1969, Austrian psychoanalyst)

I consider that women who are authors, lawyers, and politicians are monsters.

Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919, French impressionist artist)

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo's Women's War, the marriage-resisting women, silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.

Adrienne Rich (1929-, American poet)

The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctance, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926, German poet)

I buy women shoes and they use them to walk away from me.

Mickey Rooney (1920-, American actor)

It takes one woman twenty years to make a man of her son -- and another woman twenty minutes to make a fool of him.

Helen Rowland (1875-1950, American journalist)

Some women can be fooled all of the time, and all women can be fooled some of the time, but the same woman can't be fooled by the same man in the same way more than half of the time.

Helen Rowland (1875-1950, American journalist)

Woman! The peg on which the wit hangs his jest, the preacher his text, the cynic his grouch, and the sinner his justification!

Helen Rowland (1875-1950, American journalist)

I hear the singing of the lives of women. The clear mystery, the offering, the pride.

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980, American writer)

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.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970, British philosopher, mathematician, essayist)

For my part I distrust all generalizations about women, favorable and unfavorable, masculine and feminine, ancient and modern; all alike, I should say, result from paucity of experience.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970, British philosopher, mathematician, essayist)

Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman's entire but decisive advantage. Through man's passions, nature has given man into woman's hands, and the woman who does not know how to make him her subject, her slave, her toy, and how to betray him with a smile in the end is not wise.

Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

If they are ignorant, they are despised, if learned, mocked. In love they are reduced to the status of courtesans. As wives they are treated more as servants than as companions. Men do not love them: they make use of them, they exploit them, and expect, in that way, to make them subject to the law of fidelity.

George Sand (1804-1876, French novelist)

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

George Santayana (1863-1952, American philosopher, poet)

Man, born of woman, has found it a hard thing to forgive her for giving him birth. The patriarchal protest against the ancient matriarch has borne strange fruit through the years.

Lillian Smith (1897-1966, American author)

Only a male intellect clouded by the sexual drive could call the stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged sex the fair sex.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860, German philosopher)

Men are like the earth and we are the moon; we turn always one side to them, and they think there is no other, because they don't see it -- but there is.

Olive Schreiner

We all enter the world little plastic beings, with so much natural force, perhaps, but for the rest -- blank; and the world tells us what we are to be, and shapes us by the ends it sets before us. To you it says -- Work; and to us it says -- Seem! To you it says -- As you approximate to man's highest ideal of God, as your arm is strong and your knowledge great, and the power to labor is with you, so you shall gain all that human heart desires. To us it says -- Strength shall not help you, nor knowledge, nor labor. You shall gain what men gain, but by other means. And so the world makes men and women.

Olive Schreiner

He is half of a blessed man. Left to be finished by such as she; and she a fair divided excellence, whose fullness of perfection lies in him.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616, British poet, playwright, actor)

There is very little difference between men and women in space.

Helen Sharman

I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.

Becky Sharp

If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950, Irish-born British dramatist)

The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950, Irish-born British dramatist)

There is a growing strength in women, but it's in the forehead, not in the forearm.

Beverly Sills (1929-, American opera singer)

Women's virtue is man's greatest invention.

Cornelia Otis Skinner

When God created two sexes, he may have been overdoing it.

Charles M. Smith

The cliche that women, more consistently than men, turn inward for sustenance seems to mean, in practice, that women have richly defined the ways in which imagination creates possibility; possibility that society denies.

Patricia Meyer Spacks

The three sexes are men, women, and professors.

J. E. Spingarn

The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.

Freya Stark (1893-1993, British travel writer)

To behold her is an immediate check to loose behavior; to love her is a liberal education.

Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729, British dramatist, essayist, editor)

A woman who takes things from a man is called a girlfriend, a man who takes things from a woman is called a gigolo.

Ruthie Stein

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

Gloria Steinem (1934-, American feminist writer, editor)

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 her sisterhood.

Gloria Steinem (1934-, American feminist writer, editor)

I have met brave women who are exploring the outer edge of human possibility, with no history to guide them, and with a courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond words.

Gloria Steinem (1934-, American feminist writer, editor)

If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?

Gloria Steinem (1934-, American feminist writer, editor)

The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse -- as a luxury befitting a young man.

Henri B. Stendhal (1783-1842, French writer)

A woman is a branchy tree and man a singing wind; and from her branches carelessly he takes what he can find.

James Stephens (1882-1950, Irish poet, author)

The little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1895, Scottish essayist, poet, novelist)

Either sex alone is half itself.

Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892, British poet)

Man dreams of fame while woman wakes to love.

Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892, British poet)

'Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.

William M. Thackeray (1811-1863, Indian-born British novelist)

Most women defend themselves. It is the female of the species -- it is the tigress and lioness in you -- which tends to defend when attacked.

Margaret Thatcher (1925-, British Prime Minister (1979-90))

The cocks may crow, but it's the hen that lays the egg.

Margaret Thatcher (1925-, British Prime Minister (1979-90))

The anger that appears to be building up between the sexes becomes more virulent with every day that passes. And far from women taking the blame... the fact is that men are invariably portrayed as the bad guys. Being a good man is like being a good Nazi.

David Thomas (1953-, American businessman, founder of Wendy's Restaurants)

It requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862, American essayist, poet, naturalist)

I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you?

James Thurber (1894-1961, American humorist, illustrator)

Women deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of twenty-eight and forty.

James Thurber (1894-1961, American humorist, illustrator)

I have no hesitation in saying that although the American woman never leaves her domestic sphere and is in some respects very dependent within it, nowhere does she enjoy a higher station. And if anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women.

Alexis De Tocqueville (1805-1859, French social philosopher)

A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man.

Lana Turner

I repeat, sir, that in whatever position you place a woman she is an ornament to society and a treasure to the world. As a sweetheart, she has few equals and no superiors; as a cousin, she is convenient; as a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper, she is precious; as a wet-nurse, she has no equal among men. What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

Mark Twain (1835-1910, American humorist, writer)

Behind every great man there is a great woman; and behind that woman is his wife.

Author Unknown

Man loves little and often. Woman much and rarely.

Author Unknown

Men never remember, but women never forget.

Author Unknown

Men often give love for sex, women often give sex for love.

Author Unknown

The mouth of a cannon is safer that the mouth of a woman scorned.

Author Unknown

If women were humbler, men would be more honest.

Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726, British playwright and baroque architect)

Women are never stronger than when they arm themselves with their weakness.

Marie de Vichy-Chamrond

For a man to strike any women is most brutal, and I, as well as everyone else, think this far worse than any attempt to shoot, which, wicked as it is, is at least more comprehensible and more courageous.

Queen Victoria (1819-1901, British queen)

Women of quality are so civil, you can hardly distinguish love from good breeding.

William Wycherley (1640-1716, British dramatist)

Women serve but to keep a man from better company.

William Wycherley (1640-1716, British dramatist)

Men mistake friendship, but not sex, for love; women mistake sex, but not friendship, for love.

Peter Wastholm

Men mistake friendship, but not sex, for love; women mistake sex, but not friendship, for love.

Peter Wastholm

No men who really think deeply about women retain a high opinion of them; men either despise women or they have never thought seriously about them.

Otto Weininger (1880-1903, German psychologist)

The New Women! I could barely recognize them as being of the same sex as myself, their buttocks arrogant in tight jeans, openly inviting, breasts falling free and shameless and feeling no apparent obligation to smile, look pleasant or keep their voices low. And how they live! Just look at them to know how! If a man doesn't bring them to orgasm, they look for another who does. If by mistake they fall pregnant, they abort by vacuum aspiration. If they don't like the food, they push the plate away. If the job doesn't suit them, they hand in their notice. They are satiated by everything, hungry for nothing. They are what I wanted to be; they are what I worked for them to be: and now I see them, I hate them.

Fay Weldon (1933-, British novelist)

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girl friends. And they tolerated it and let us go ahead and play with our toys.

Orson Welles (1915-1985, American film maker)

When women go wrong, men go right after them.

Mae West (1892-1980, American actress)

Women are as old as they feel and men are old when they lose their feelings.

Mae West (1892-1980, American actress)

The main difference between men and woman is that men are lunatics and woman are idiots.

Rebecca West (1892-1983, British author)

It is well within the order of things that man should listen when his mate sings; but the true male never yet walked who liked to listen when his mate talked.

Anna Wickham

Give us that grand word "woman:" once again, and let's have done with "lady"; one's a term full of fine force, strong, beautiful, and firm, fit for the noblest use of tongue or pen; and one's a word for lackeys.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1855-1919, American poet, journalist)

We have now traced the history of women from Paradise to the nineteenth century and have heard nothing through the long roll of the ages but the clank of their fetters.

Lady Jane Wilde

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.