Definition of “woman”

Quotations

• "She floats, she hesitates; in a word, she's a woman" Jean Racine
• "The meaning of what it is to be a woman has never been more open-ended and therefore more filled with anxiety" Nancy Friday
• "Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size" Virginia Woolf
• "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
• "When a woman behaves like a man why doesn't she behave like a nice man?" Edith Evans
• "The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is `What does a woman want?'" Sigmund Freud
• "A woman can look both moral and exciting - if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle" Edna Ferber
• "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
• "Fickle and changeable always is woman" Virgil
• "A man is as old as he's feeling,A woman as old as she looks" Mortimer Collins
• "Men play the game, women know the score" Roger Woddis
• "A complete woman is probably not a very admirable creature. She is manipulative, uses other people to get her own way, and works within whatever system she is in" Anita Brookner
• "The prime truth of woman, the universal mother...that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly" G.K. Chesterton
• "One is not born a woman; one becomes one" Simone de Beauvoir
• "Woman was God's second blunder" Friedrich Nietzsche
• "Being a woman is of special interest only to aspiring male transsexuals. To actual women it is merely a good excuse not to play football" Fran Lebowitz
• "The greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men" Pericles
• "A woman seldom writes her mind but in her postscript" Sir Richard Steele
• "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle" attributed to Gloria Steinem
• "Frailty, thy name is woman!" William Shakespeare
• "Men, at most, differ as Heaven and earth,But women, worst and best, as Heaven and Hell" Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• "A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can" Jane Austen
• "A woman's place is in the wrong" James Thurber
• "I expect that woman will be the last thing civilized by man" George Meredith
• "A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands equal rights with men. A woman who is intelligent does not" Colette
• "Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily this is not difficult" Charlotte Whitton
• "I hate women because they always know where things are" James Thurber
• "Most women are not as young as they are painted" Sir Max Beerbohm
• "She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression" C.S. Lewis
• "A woman knows enough if she knows enough to mend our shirts and cook us a steak" Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
• "Man has his will; but woman has her way" O.W. Holmes
• "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his" Oscar Wilde
• "When women go wrong, men go right after them" Mae West
• "Women - one half of the human race at least - care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry" Walter Bagehot
• "Women can't forgive failure" Anton Chekhov
• "Women, then, are only children of a larger growth" Lord Chesterfield
• "Can anything be more absurd than keeping women in a state of ignorance, and yet so vehemently to insist on their resisting temptation?" Vicesimus Knox
• "Women are really much nicer than men: no wonder we like them" Kingsley Amis
• "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" Gloria Steinem
• "There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature" Lawrence Durrell
• "If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?" Mary Astell
• "Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything" Anita Brookner
• "O fairest of creation, last and bestOf all God's works" John Milton
• "Music and women I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is" Samuel Pepys
• "A woman's place is in the home"
• "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned"
• "A woman's work is never done"