Quotes about woman
page 24

Cesare Pavese photo
Warren Farrell photo
Sören Kierkegaard photo
John Bunyan photo

“Gaius also proceeded, and said, I will now speak on the behalf of women, to take away their reproach. For as death and the curse came into the world by a woman, Gen. 3, so also did life and health: God sent forth his Son, made of a woman. Gal. 4:4. Yea, to show how much they that came after did abhor the act of the mother, this sex in the Old Testament coveted children, if happily this or that woman might be the mother of the Saviour of the world. I will say again, that when the Saviour was come, women rejoiced in him, before either man or angel. Luke 1:42-46. I read not that ever any man did give unto Christ so much as one groat; but the women followed him, and ministered to him of their substance. Luke 8:2,3. ‘Twas a woman that washed his feet with tears, Luke 7:37-50, and a woman that anointed his body at the burial. John 11:2; 12:3. They were women who wept when he was going to the cross, Luke 23:27, and women that followed him from the cross, Matt. 27:55,56; Luke 23:55, and sat over against his sepulchre when he was buried. Matt. 27:61. They were women that were first with him at his resurrection-morn, Luke 24:1, and women that brought tidings first to his disciples that he was risen from the dead. Luke 24:22,23. Women therefore are highly favored, and show by these things that they are sharers with us in the grace of life.”

Part II, Ch. VIII : The Guests of Gaius
The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), Part II

Vātsyāyana photo
T. B. Joshua photo

“When God calls a man or woman, what they will eat, what they will use and everything they need for their journey will be provided abundantly by God.”

T. B. Joshua (1963) Nigerian Christian leader

On tithing - "TB Joshua Returns Elderly Woman's Half-A-Million Naira Tithe" http://www.premiumtimesng.com/letter-to-the-editor/176233-t-b-joshua-returns-elderly-womans-half-a-million-naira-tithe176233.html Premium Times, Nigeria (February 4 2015)

Camille Paglia photo
Thomas Otway photo

“What mighty ills have not been done by woman!
Who was ’t betrayed the Capitol?—A woman!
Who lost Mark Antony the world?—A woman!
Who was the cause of a long ten years’ war,
And laid at last old Troy in ashes?—Woman!
Destructive, damnable, deceitful woman!”

The Orphan (1680), Act iii. Sc. 1. Compare: "O woman, woman! when to ill thy mind/ Is bent, all hell contains no fouler fiend", Alexander Pope, Homer’s Odyssey, book xi., line 531.

Christopher Titus photo

“I don't think a man should EVER hit a woman….. until the 5th time she cracks him in the face.”

Christopher Titus (1964) actor, writer, podcaster

Norman Rockwell is Bleeding (2004)

Dan Quayle photo
Elbert Hubbard photo

“Woman's inaptitude for reasoning has not prevented her from arriving at truth; nor has man's ability to reason prevented him from floundering in absurdity.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (1927)

Robert Olmstead photo
Thomas Otway photo
Gregory Benford photo
Jeff Foxworthy photo
Pope Benedict XVI photo
Chinua Achebe photo
Walt Disney photo

“Girls bored me — they still do. I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I've ever known.”

Walt Disney (1901–1966) American film producer and businessman

As quoted in You Must Remember This (1975) by Walter Wagner

George Chapman photo

“Black is a pearl in a woman's eye.”

An Humorous Day's Mirth; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Graham Greene photo
Farah Pahlavi photo
Mary Wollstonecraft photo
Robert Burns photo

“Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman;
Tho' they may gang a kennin wrang,
To step aside is human.”

Robert Burns (1759–1796) Scottish poet and lyricist

Address to the Unco Guid, st. 7 (1787)

Colette Dowling photo
Robert Jordan photo

“Dance well with a woman, and she’s halfway yours.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Matrim Cauthon
(15 October 1994)

Warren Farrell photo
Richard Rodríguez photo
Karl Kraus photo
Wallace Stevens photo
Peter Paul Rubens photo
George Bernard Shaw photo
Vasco Rossi photo

“"Thank Heaven who gave us the woman!"
(concert in Florence, june 2005)”

Vasco Rossi (1980) Italian singer-songwriter

Siamo solo noi (1981)

Robert Jordan photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“I must say that when my Southern Christian Leadership Conference began its work in Birmingham, we encountered numerous Negro church reactions that had to be overcome. Negro ministers were among other Negro leaders who felt they were being pulled into something that they had not helped to organize. This is almost always a problem. Negro community unity was the first requisite if our goals were to be realized. I talked with many groups, including one group of 200 ministers, my theme to them being that a minister cannot preach the glories of heaven while ignoring social conditions in his own community that cause men an earthly hell. I stressed that the Negro minister had particular freedom and independence to provide strong, firm leadership, and I asked how the Negro would ever gain freedom without his minister's guidance, support and inspiration. These ministers finally decided to entrust our movement with their support, and as a result, the role of the Negro church today, by and large, is a glorious example in the history of Christendom. For never in Christian history, within a Christian country, have Christian churches been on the receiving end of such naked brutality and violence as we are witnessing here in America today. Not since the days of the Christians in the catacombs has God's house, as a symbol, weathered such attack as the Negro churches.
I shall never forget the grief and bitterness I felt on that terrible September morning when a bomb blew out the lives of those four little, innocent girls sitting in their Sunday-school class in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. I think of how a woman cried out, crunching through broken glass, "My God, we're not even safe in church!" I think of how that explosion blew the face of Jesus Christ from a stained-glass window. It was symbolic of how sin and evil had blotted out the life of Christ. I can remember thinking that if men were this bestial, was it all worth it? Was there any hope? Was there any way out?… time has healed the wounds -- and buoyed me with the inspiration of another moment which I shall never forget: when I saw with my own eyes over 3000 young Negro boys and girls, totally unarmed, leave Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church to march to a prayer meeting -- ready to pit nothing but the power of their bodies and souls against Bull Connor's police dogs, clubs and fire hoses. When they refused Connor's bellowed order to turn back, he whirled and shouted to his men to turn on the hoses. It was one of the most fantastic events of the Birmingham story that these Negroes, many of them on their knees, stared, unafraid and unmoving, at Connor's men with the hose nozzles in their hands. Then, slowly the Negroes stood up and advanced, and Connor's men fell back as though hypnotized, as the Negroes marched on past to hold their prayer meeting. I saw there, I felt there, for the first time, the pride and the power of nonviolence.
Another time I will never forget was one Saturday night, late, when my brother telephoned me in Atlanta from Birmingham -- that city which some call "Bombingham" -- which I had just left. He told me that a bomb had wrecked his home, and that another bomb, positioned to exert its maximum force upon the motel room in which I had been staying, had injured several people. My brother described the terror in the streets as Negroes, furious at the bombings, fought whites. Then, behind his voice, I heard a rising chorus of beautiful singing: "We shall overcome."”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Tears came into my eyes that at such a tragic moment, my race still could sing its hope and faith.
Interview in Playboy (January 1965) https://web.archive.org/web/20080706183244/http://www.playboy.com/arts-entertainment/features/mlk/04.html
1960s

Warren Farrell photo

“Contract killings never get recorded as a woman killing a man.”

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 281.

Hildegard of Bingen photo
H. Rider Haggard photo
Paul Bourget photo

“Well, you must now imagine my friend at my age or almost there. You must picture him growing gray, tired of life and convinced that he had at last discovered the secret of peace. At this time he met, while visiting some relatives in a country house, a mere girl of twenty, who was the image, the haunting image of her whom he had hoped to marry thirty years before. It was one of those strange resemblances which extend from the color of the eyes to the 'timbre' of the voice, from the smile to the thought, from the gestures to the finest feelings of the heart. I could not, in a few disjointed phrases describe to you the strange emotions of my friend. It would take pages and pages to make you understand the tenderness, both present and at the same time retrospective, for the dead through the living; the hypnotic condition of the soul which does not know where dreams and memories end and present feeling begins; the daily commingling of the most unreal thing in the world, the phantom of a lost love, with the freshest, the most actual, the most irresistibly naïve and spontaneous thing in it, a young girl. She comes, she goes, she laughs, she sings, you go about with her in the intimacy of country life, and at her side walks one long dead. After two weeks of almost careless abandon to the dangerous delights of this inward agitation imagine my friend entering by chance one morning one of the less frequented rooms of the house, a gallery, where, among other pictures, hung a portrait of himself, painted when he was twenty-five. He approaches the portrait abstractedly. There had been a fire in the room, so that a slight moisture dimmed the glass which protected the pastel, and on this glass, because of this moisture, he sees distinctly the trace of two lips which had been placed upon the eyes of the portrait, two small delicate lips, the sight of which makes his heart beat. He leaves the gallery, questions a servant, who tells him that no one but the young woman he has in mind has been in the room that morning.”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

Pierre Fauchery, as quoted by the character "Jules Labarthe"
The Age for Love

Marianne von Werefkin photo
Michael Swanwick photo
Markiplier photo
Victor Villaseñor photo
Julian of Norwich photo
Anastacia photo
Margaret Mead photo

“It has been a woman's task throughout history to go on believing in life when there was almost no hope. lf we are united, we may be able to produce a world in which our children and other people's children will be safe.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Margaret Mead (1978) cited in: United States. National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year The spirit of Houston: the First National Women's Conference. Vol. 84, Nr 1978, p. 153
1970s

Guy De Maupassant photo
James Thurber photo

“Somebody has said that woman's place is in the wrong. That's fine. What the wrong needs is a woman's presence and a woman's touch. She is far better equipped than men to set it right.”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

"The Duchess and the Bugs", 'Lanterns & Lances (1961).
From Lanterns and Lances‎

Waylon Jennings photo

“Oh rainy day woman,
I've never seem to see you for the good times or the sunshine.
You have been a friend of mine, rainy day woman.”

Waylon Jennings (1937–2002) American country music singer, songwriter, and musician

Rainy Day Woman, from The Ramblin' Man (1974).
Song lyrics

George Bernard Shaw photo

“It's well to be off with the Old Woman before you're on with the New.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Act II
1890s, The Philanderer (1893)

Ambrose Bierce photo
Dora Russell photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“Ah, Woman has no look so sweet
As that, when, half afraid to meet
The look she loves, blushes betray
All the suppressed glance would say.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(15th March 1823) Poetical Catalogue of Pictures. Vandyke consulting his Mistress on a Picture in Cooke's Exhibition.
The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Anthony Trollope photo

“There are words which a man cannot resist from a woman, even though he knows them to be false.”

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) English novelist (1815-1882)

Is He Popenjoy? (1878), Ch. 18

Anthony Burgess photo
Warren Farrell photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Otto Weininger photo
Colley Cibber photo

“We shall find no fiend in hell can match the fury of a disappointed woman,—scorned, slighted, dismissed without a parting pang.”

Love's Last Shift, Act IV (1696). Compare: "Heav'n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn'd,
Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn'd", William Congreve, The Mourning Bride (1697), Act III, scene viii (often paraphrased: "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned").

Cora L. V. Scott photo
Katherine Mansfield photo

“I'm a writer first & a woman after.”

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) New Zealand author

Letter to John Middleton Murry (3 December 1920), from The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, vol. IV

Warren Farrell photo
André Maurois photo
William Lane Craig photo
Marc Chagall photo
Laurence Sterne photo
Richard Henry Dana Jr. photo
Luis Miguel photo

“I think any woman can be the ideal woman.”

Luis Miguel (1970) Puerto Rican singer; music producer

Interview in Chile, 1997

John Gay photo
Jeff Foxworthy photo

“If you're a man and you can't remember the last time you had sex with a woman, you're either gay or married.”

Jeff Foxworthy (1958) American stand-up comedian

Have Your Loved Ones Spayed and Neutered (2004)
Variant: If you're a man and you've ever been antique shopping during a big football game, you're either gay or married.

Edgar Degas photo

“Draw all kind of everyday object placed, in such a way that they have in them the life of the man or woman – corsets that have just been removed, for example, and which retain the form of the body. Do a series in aquatint on mourning, different blacks – black veils of deep mourning floating on the face – black gloves – mourning carriages, undertaker’s vehicles – carriages like Venetian gondolas. On smoke – smoker’s smoke, pipes, cigarettes, cigars – smoke from locomotives, from tall factory chimneys, from steam boats, etc. On evening – infinite variety of subjects in cafes, different tones of glass robes reflected in the mirrors. On bakery, bread. Series of baker's boys, seen in the cellar itself or through the basement windows from the street – backs the colour of the pink flour – beautiful curves of dough – still-life's of different breads, large, oval, long, round, etc. Studies in color of the yellows, pinks, grays, whites of bread…… Neither monuments nor houses have ever been done from below, close up as they appear when you walk down the street. [a working note in which Degas planned series of views of modern Paris, the same time when he sketched the backstreet brothels, making graphic unflinching and even his realistic 'pornographic' sketches he called his 'glimpses through the keyhole', in which he also experimented with perspectives]”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

Quote from Degas' Notebooks; Clarendon Press, Oxford 1976, nos 30 & 34 circa 1877; as quoted in The private lives of the Impressionists, Sue Roe, Harpen Collins Publishers, New York 2006, p. 182
quotes, undated

Regina Jonas photo
Warren Farrell photo
Henning von Tresckow photo
Kancha Ilaiah photo

“Buddhism today is a dalitist religion and Hinduism is a brahminic religion with oppositional spiritual positions about human equality and man-woman relations.”

Kancha Ilaiah (1952) Indian scholar, activist and writer

"Chinese lesson for RSS" in Deccan Chronicle (05 May 2015) http://www.deccanchronicle.com/150505/commentary-columnists/article/chinese-lesson-rss.

Charles Bukowski photo
Julia Gillard photo
Brett Velicovich photo
Anthony Burgess photo
Georgia Hopley photo

“I hope the first bootlegger I get is not the 'first woman bootlegger”

Georgia Hopley (1858–1944) American journalist and temperance advocate

Quoted in various newspaper articles, e.g. Albuquerque Morning Journal (Albuquerque, N.M.), February 16, 1922 http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84031081/1922-02-16/ed-1/seq-7/, and The Bridgeport Times, February 18, 1922 http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn92051227/1922-02-18/ed-1/seq-10/

Goran Višnjić photo
Donald J. Trump photo

“Hillary Clinton I think is a terrific woman. I am biased because I have known her for years. I live in New York. She lives in New York. I really like her and her husband both a lot. I think she really works hard. And I think, again, she's given an agenda, it is not all of her, but I think she really works hard and I think she does a good job. I like her.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2007 CNN interview, reported in Zeke J. Miller, " When Donald Trump Praised Hillary Clinton http://time.com/3962799/donald-trump-hillary-clinton/", Time Magazine (July 17, 2015).
2000s

Anton Chekhov photo

“A woman can only become a man’s friend in three stages: first, she’s an agreeable acquaintance, then a mistress, and only after that a friend.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Act II
Uncle Vanya (1897)

Clarence Thomas photo
Ben Croshaw photo

“Winning the lottery is like slipping your hand into the bra of the most beautiful woman in the world, then getting it stuck and having to saw it off at the wrist.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

Source: Fullyramblomatic Novels, Articulate Jim: A Search For Something, Chapter Eight

Sarah Grimké photo

“I know nothing of man’s rights, or woman’s rights; human rights are all that I recognise.”

Sarah Grimké (1792–1873) American abolitionist

Letter 15 (October 20, 1837).
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837)

Elizabeth Cady Stanton photo

“The word "artist" means man unless qualified by the category "woman."”

Women, Art, and Society: Fourth Edition (2007) ISBN 0-500-20393-8

Wisława Szymborska photo

“Born.
So he was born, too.
Born like everyone else.
Like me, who will die.
The son of an actual woman.
A new arrival from the body's depths.
A voyager to Omega.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

"Born"
Poems New and Collected (1998), No End of Fun (1967)

Bob Dole photo

“If Lincoln had an affair with a slave woman, it would be an outrage, but when Clinton does it with one of his staff, everyone is okay with it.”

Bob Dole (1923) American politician

Reported in Tom Crisp, The Book of Bob: Choice Words, Memorable Men (2007), p. 126