WOMEN QUOTES IX
quotations about women
There are two streams in the minds of our people: one in which women are really oppressed and given very low status and one in which they are given very high honour, sometimes even greater honour than men, at least if not in fact, in language and metaphor.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Conversations with Chinua Achebe
Lone women, like to empty houses, perish.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
Hero and Leander
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
As all-consuming as a young girl's fancies were ... a woman's desires could be twice as dangerous.
TERESA MEDEIROS
The Vampire Who Loved Me
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
There are, without counting grocers and drapers, so many people who, to kill time, occupy themselves in seeking for the hidden motives which direct women's actions, that it is a work of charity to classify by titles and in chapters all the private circumstances of marriage; a good index will enable them to put their finger on the motions of their wives' hearts, just as logarithmic tables give them the product of any two numbers.
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
Woman's mind
Oft' shifts her passions, like th'inconstant wind;
Sudden she rages, like the troubled main,
Now sinks the storm, and all is calm again.
JOHN GAY
Dione
The married woman is a slave whom one must know how to set upon a throne.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The sweetest music is the sound of the voice of the woman we love.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Women", Les Caractères
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
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
Women are the field that produces our nation. And if you can't protect your women, you can't protect your nation.
MUHAMMAD ALI
interview, Playboy, November 1975
The influence of woman is the same everywhere. Her condition influences the morals, manners, and character of the people of all countries. Where she is debased, society is debased; where she is morally pure and enlightened, society will be proportionately elevated.
SAMUEL SMILES
Character
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
When a woman weeps, it is a man's shame.
LEONID ANDREYEV
The Life of Man
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
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
The virtue of women is perhaps a question of temperament.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
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