I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner.
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
- Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,
- 'Tis woman's whole existence.
LORD BYRON, Don Juan
It is the plain women who know about love; the beautiful women are too busy being fascinating.-KATHARINE HEPBURN, Evan Esar's 20,000 Quips & Quotes
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, Ernest Jones' Sigmund Freud: Life and Work
A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view.
HENRIK IBSEN, From Ibsen's Workshop
There is in every true woman's heart, a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity, but which kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.
WASHINGTON IRVING, The Sketch Book
Men are allowed to have passion and commitment for their work ... a woman is allowed that feeling for a man, but not her work.
BARBRA STREISAND, People Magazine, May 31, 1993
Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has a single solution: that is, pregnancy.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Thus Spake Zarathustra
For I cannot think that GOD Almighty ever made them [women] so delicate, so glorious creatures; and furnished them with such charms, so agreeable and so delightful to mankind; with souls capable of the same accomplishments with men: and all, to be only Stewards of our Houses, Cooks, and Slaves.
DANIEL DEFOE, The Education of Women
A woman's whole life is a history of the affections.
WASHINGTON IRVING, The Sketch Book
Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, The Scarlet Letter
You won't regret the men you never killed, but you will regret the women you passed up.
BERNARD CORNWELL, The Winter King
Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.
CHARLOTTE BRONTE, Jane Eyre
- I, Woman, am that wonder-breathing rose
- That blossoms in the garden of the King.
I'm not denyin' the women are foolish: God Almighty made 'em to match the men.
It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status.
HOWARD ZINN, A People's History of the United States
- Of all things upon earth that bleed and grow,
- A herb most bruised is woman.
The sexual life of adult women is a “dark continent” for psychology.
SIGMUND FREUD, The Question of Lay Analysis 
- 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.
The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, Table Talk, July 23, 1827
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.
JOHN GRAY, Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus 
Woman ... is the divine object, violated, endlessly sacrificed yet always reborn, whose only joy, achieved through a subtle interplay of images, lies in contemplation of herself.
PAULINE RÉAGE, introduction, The Image
The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analysed, women ... merely adored.
OSCAR WILDE, The Ideal Husband
