These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: Can't live with them, or without them.
~ Aristophanes

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.
~ Jane Austen

To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.
~ Jane Austen

When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even out virtues.
~ Honore De Balzac

.. it's a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it you don't need to have anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have.
~ Sir James M. Barrie

What Women Want: To be loved, to be listened to, to be desired, to be respected, to be needed, to be trusted, and sometimes, just to be held. What Men Want: Tickets for the world series.
~ Dave Barry

The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said, to the shame of philosophical delights, the most lasting joys; the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend for whom and by whom fortunes are made and lost; for whom, but especially by whom, artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels; from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings -- woman, in a word, is not, for the artist in general... only the female of the human species. She is rather a divinity, a star.
~ Charles Baudelaire

We have dreamt of every woman there is, and dreamt too of the miracle that would bring us the pleasure of being a woman, for women have all the qualities -- courage, passion, the capacity to love, cunning -- whereas all our imagination can do is naively pile up the illusion of courage.
~ Jean Baudrillard

Femininity appears to be one of those pivotal qualities that is so important no one can define it.
~ Caroline Bird

Women have no wilderness in them. They are provident instead content in the tight hot cell of their hearts. To eat dusty bread.
~ Louise Bogan

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

Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.
~ Anita Brookner

It will be a pity if women in the more conventional mould are to be phased out, for there will never be anyone to go home to.
~ Anita Brookner

A woman cannot do the thing she ought, which means whatever perfect thing she can, in life, in art, in science, but she fears to let the perfect action take her part and rest there: she must prove what she can do before she does it, -- prate of woman's rights, of woman's mission, woman's function, till the men (who are prating, too, on their side) cry, ''A woman's function plainly is... to talk.'' Poor souls, they are very reasonably vexed!
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Eve is a twofold mystery.
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Women hate everything which strips off the tinsel of sentiment, and they are right, or it would rob them of their weapons.
~ Lord Byron

If Miss means respectably unmarried, and Mrs. respectably married, then Ms. means nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
~ Angela Carter

I have always found women difficult. I don't really understand them. To begin with, few women tell the truth.
~ Barbara Cartland

The trouble with some women is they get all excited about nothing, and then they marry him.
~ Cher

You may be a princess or the richest woman in the world, but you cannot be more than a lady.
~ Jennie Jerome Churchill