Quotes & Sayings About Being A Woman In A Man's World

When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity's potential for building a better world, and so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope. — Mohsin Hamid

But you cannot deny, that man and woman are mortal enemies, in your serene sunlit world as well as in our foggy one. In love there is union into a single being for a short time only, capable of only one thought, one sensation, one will, in order to be then further disunited. And you know this better than I; whichever of the two fails to subjugate will soon feel the feet of the other on his neck - — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average
but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world — Charles Bukowski

That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don't they? She's a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. — Gillian Flynn

Landsman recognizes the expression on Dick's face ... The face of a man who feels he was born into the wrong world. A mistake has been made; he is not where he belongs. Every so often he feels his heart catch, like a kite on a telephone wire, on something that seems to promise him a home in the world or a means of getting there. An American car manufactured in his far-off boyhood, say, or a motorcycle that once belonged to the future king of England, or the face of a woman worthier than himself of being loved. — Michael Chabon

As any man, I, of course, have certain preferences. Being a Scot by birth, I'm inclined to favor those with a well-scrubbed look and a hint of color in their cheeks-put there by an early walk in the chill air rather than by rouge. The smell of soap on a woman's skin or the hint of shampoo in her hair is perfume enough for me ... Humor is important. The most beautiful woman in the world is a bore without that. — David Niven

Being a woman writer, I would be deceiving myself if I said I write completely through the eye of a man. There's nothing bad in it, but that does not make me a feminist writer. I hate that name. The tag is from the Western world - like we are called the Third World. — Buchi Emecheta

A man is not merely a man but a man among men, in a world of men. Being good at being a man has more to do with a man's ability to succeed with men and within groups of men than it does with a man's relationship to any woman or any group of women. When someone tells a man to be a man, they are telling him to be more like other men, more like the majority of men, and ideally more like the men who other men hold in high regard. — Jack Donovan

He wished at that moment that his whole life had not been a secret, that lots of people were like him, instead of his being alone in a world where everyone was secure in their place as either woman or man. His aloneness was what made him feel ashamed, and he did not know why it had to be so. — Kathleen Winter

I like being a woman, even in a man's world. After all, men can't wear dresses, but we can wear the pants. — Whitney Houston

Only a woman can carry in her body an eternal being which bears the very image of God. Only she is the recipient of the miracle of life. Only a woman can conceive and nurture this life using her own flesh and blood, and then deliver a living soul into the world. God has bestowed upon her alone a genuine miracle - the creation of life, and the fusing of an eternal soul with mortal flesh. This fact alone establishes the glory of motherhood.
Despite the most creative plans of humanist scientists and lawmakers to redefine the sexes, no man will ever conceive and give birth to a child. The fruitful womb is a holy gift given by God to women alone. This is one reason why the office of wife and mother is the highest calling to which a woman can aspire.
This is the reason why nations that fear the Lord esteem and protect mothers. They glory in the distinctions between men and women, and attempt to build cultures in which motherhood is honored and protected. — Douglas W. Phillips

What is it which makes a man and a woman know that they, of all other men and women in the world, belong to each other? Is it no more than chance and meeting? no more than being alive together in the world at the same time? Is it only a curve of the throat, a line of the chin, the way the eyes are set, a way of speaking? Or is it something deeper and stranger, something beyond meeting, something beyond chance and fortune? Are there others, in other times of the world, whom we should have loved, who would have loved us? Is there, perhaps, one soul among all others
among all who have lived, the endless generations, from world's end to world's end
who must love us or die? And whom we must love, in turn
whom we must seek all our lives long
headlong and homesick
until the end? — Robert Nathan

I was once talking about gender and a man said to me, "Why does it have to be you as a woman? Why not you as a human being?" This type of question is a way of silencing a person's specific experiences. Of course I am a human being, but there are particular things that happen to me in the world because I am a woman. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

If any one thinks I am unfaithful to human fact, and overcharge the description of this child, I on my side doubt the extent of the experience of that man or woman. I admit the child a rarity, but a rarity in the right direction, and therefore a being with whom humanity has the greater need to be made acquainted. I admit that the best things are the commonest, but the highest types and the best combinations of them are the rarest. There is more love in the world than anything else, for instance; but the best love and the individual in whom love is supreme are the rarest of all things. — George MacDonald

It's all been worth it. Every fight, all those years of childish experimentation, the occasional heartbreak, the paltry checking account, the used, old trucks. To have lived with another human being, another person, this man, as long as I have, and to see him change and grow. To see him become more decent and more patient, stronger and more competent - to see how he loves our children - how he wrestles with them on the floor and kisses them unabashedly in public. To hear his voice in the evening, reading books to them, or explaining to them what his father was like while he was alive, or what I was like as a girl, a teenager, a young woman. To hear him explain why our part of the world is so special. — Nickolas Butler

It suddenly dawned on me one day, when I was reading in the paper about a woman wrestler, that being a curmudgeon was the last thing in the world that a man can be that a woman cannot be. Women can be irritating
after all, they are women
but they cannot be curmudgeons. — Cleveland Amory

I think it's just that as a creative person, in all the different things that I've done or ways that I've found to express myself, I've consistently come up against resistance in certain areas. I think that the world is not comfortable with female sexuality. It's always coming from a male point of view, and a woman is being objectified by a man - and even women are comfortable with that. But when a woman does it, ironically, women are uncomfortable with it. I think a lot of that has to do with conditioning. — Madonna Ciccone

I generally don't like living in a world where being what a man is, is a horrible thing; and no matter what a woman is, is a wonderful thing. — Patrice O'Neal

I swear that while I live I will do what little I can to preserve and to augment the liberties of man, woman, and child.
It is a question of justice, of mercy, of honesty, of intellectual development. If there is a man in the world who is not willing to give to every human being every right he claims for himself, he is just so much nearer a barbarian than I am. It is a question of honesty. The man who is not willing to give to every other the same intellectual rights he claims for himself, is dishonest, selfish, and brutal. — Robert G. Ingersoll

Despite his heterodoxy, faults, and weaknesses, Clare was a man with a conscience. Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss; but a woman living her precious life - a life which, to herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of the mightiest to himself. Upon her sensations the whole world depended to Tess; through her existence all her fellow-creatures existed, to her. The universe itself only came into being for Tess on the particular day in the particular year in which she was born. — Thomas Hardy

Our civilisation being what it is, you've got to spent eight hours out of every twenty-four as a mixture between an imbecile and a sewing machine. It's very disagreeable, I know. It's humiliating and disgusting. But there you are. You've got to do it, otherwise the whole fabric of our world will fall to bits and we'll starve. Do the job then, idiotically and mechanically; and spend your leisure hours in being a real complete man or woman. — Aldous Huxley

And one day when you wake up, you happen to realise that your battle isn't with the man you had got into a brawl with the other day, it isn't with a friend turned foe, it isn't with those parents who chose to give up on you, it isn't with the bus driver for not having waited until you got in, it isn't with the employer who cancelled the application to your leave, it isn't with the examiner who resolved into failing you, it isn't with the woman who did not reciprocate your feelings, it isn't with child who dropped his ice-cream cone on you, it isn't with your ill fate and it isn't with that superior being above you.
Your battle, your fight isn't against the world but against yourself and the only way to come through all of it and beyond, to win, is improvement, self-improvement which needs to be gradual and progressive with the transverse of each day. — Chirag Tulsiani

Now that I'd experienced being a woman to a man I was in love with, I'd become self-conscious about being a woman to the world in general. Of course, being female is always indelicate and extreme, like operating heavy machinery. Every woman knows the feeling of being a stack of roving flesh. Sometimes all you've accomplished by the end of the day is to have maneuvered your body through space without grave incident. — Hilary Thayer Hamann

I'm a fucking idiot.
No, he was a man in love with a woman who meant the entire universe to him.
Like I said, you're a fucking idiot.
And for the first time in his life, he was happy being stupid because the only alternative would be existing without her, and now that he'd tasted the sunlight she brought into his world, he never wanted to live in the darkness again.
Please don't send me back to the night. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Black women are some of the most colorful women in the world. We come in all shadeshave so many hair textures..eye colors..body types. In this generation, it's sad to see so many black girls claiming ethnicities that they know nothing about in hopes of impressing a man or appearing 'exotic'. So many people act as if being black and beautiful is impossible. It's not. If we wanna get technical and look at our history, almost every black American is mixed. But we must stop implying that a woman's beauty comes from a part of her that is not black. — Skye Townsend

What we love is too much in the past, consists too much in the time that we have spent together for us to require the whole woman; we wish only to be sure that it is she, not to be mistaken as to her identity, a thing far more important than beauty to those who are in love; her cheeks may grow hollow, her body thin, even to those who were originally most proud, in the eyes of the world, of their domination over beauty, that little tip of a nose, that sign in which is summed up the permanent personality of a woman, that algebraical formula, that constant, is sufficient to prevent a man who is courted in the highest society and is in love with her from being free upon a single evening because he is spending his evenings in brushing and entangling, until it is time to go to bed, the hair of the woman whom he loves, or simply in staying by her side, so that he may be with her or she with him, or merely that she may not be with other people. — Marcel Proust

Being a fiction writer is really like being an actor, because if you're going to write convincingly it has to sound right and play right. The only way that works is to emotionally and technically act out and see the scene you're in.
There's no better job in the world, because when I sit down at that computer I'm the world's best forensics expert, if that's what I'm writing about that day. Or I'm some crazed psycho running down a dark alley.
Or I'm a gorgeous woman looking to find a man that night. Whatever! But I'm all of those things, every day. How can you beat that? — Ridley Pearson

I learned a lot about systems of oppression and how they can be blind to one another by talking to black men. I was once talking about gender and a man said to me, "Why does it have to be you as a woman? Why not you as a human being?" This type of question is a way of silencing a person's specific experiences. Of course I am a human being, but there are particular things that happen to me in the world because I am a woman. This same man, by the way, would often talk about his experience as a black man. (To which I should probably have responded, "Why not your experiences as a man or as a human being? Why a black man?") — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Watching Nadia rest peacefully in my embrace, I am reminded that it is the woman who is marveled upon, where man kneels in silence to honor and respect; and it is that same marvel that cures a good man into being a better man if not the world. — Luccini Shurod

In my personal life I'm not very tough at all, but in my professional life, having to deal with being a woman in a man's world, I'm really tough. I never back down from a fight or an argument. I'm willing to stand there toe to toe with anyone. — Cher

Money might give people all the control and power in the world they can buy, but it doesn't give them what's most important. Designer dresses doesn't give a woman beauty if she's not amazing in her heart. Diamonds won't give her dignity if she has no good in her soul. Education doesn't make a man worthy. A last name won't garner someone respect unless they can work for it. Those are things we earn by being who we are. You are wonderful. — Bethany-Kris

For all the feminist jabber about women being victimized by fashion, it is men who most suffer from conventions of dress. Every day, a woman can choose from an army of personae, femme to butch, and can cut or curl her hair or adorn herself with a staggering variety of artistic aids. But despite the Sixties experiments in peacock dress, no man can rise in the corporate world today, outside the entertainment industry, with long hair or makeup or purple velvet suits. — Camille Paglia

If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata
of creatures that worked like machines
would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free. — C.S. Lewis

He prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity's potential for building a better world. — Mohsin Hamid

Gracious Creator of the whole human race! hast thou created such a being as woman, who can trace thy wisdom in thy works, and feel that thou alone art by thy nature, exalted above her-for no better purpose? Can she believe that she was only made to submit to man her equal; a being, who, like her, was sent into the world to acquire virtue? Can she consent to be occupied merely to please him; merely to adorn the earth, when her soul is capable of rising to thee? And can she rest supinely dependent on man for reason, when she ought to mount with him the arduous steeps of knowledge? — Mary Wollstonecraft

So I told him that I don't look for boyfriends; I look for a person, then if the person happens to be the one then he's the one. And if not, then not! And I was also thinking to myself, about how I will not commit myself to a man more than he is willing to commit himself to me. I refuse to be braver. I choose to be secure. I am brave in so many areas of life and when it comes to a man I would rather he be braver than I. I would rather he commit himself to me in ways that will make my heart know him so well that I can say he swims in my blood and he walks inside my bones. But for me to throw my commitment in front of him, on the ground, to see if it's good enough? Hell will freeze over before that happens. I compromise myself in many ways, because compromise is selfless and compromise is giving. But one thing I will not compromise is my commitment. I have to feel safe to do that. I have to know that I am reciprocating; not initiating. — C. JoyBell C.

These poets and other creative persons are the ones who express being itself, he held. As I would put it, these are the ones who enlarge human consciousness. Their creativity is the most basic manifestation of a man or woman fulfilling his or her own being in the world. — Rollo May

Being a woman in music was fine, but when I wanted to direct, I was poking my head into a man's world. — Barbra Streisand

Not the wretchedest man or woman but has a deep secretive mythology with which to wrestle with the material world and to overcome it and pass beyond it. Not the wretchedest human being but has his share in the creative energy that builds the world. We are all creators. We all create a mythological world of our own out of certain shapeless materials. — John Cowper Powys