Women Nurture Quotes & Sayings

You need to be able to nurture yourself in order to be a good mother, good at your job, good at servicing your community. I really believe women can do it all, but they can't do it all at the expense of their health, their sleep, and their sense of well-being. — Arianna Huffington

She preferred to nurture healthy relationships with a few women, like Shelby, a genuinely loyal friend, and weed out weak and petty imposters who passed through her life. — Sarah Jo Smith

In times of change and uncertainty, we need the spirit of jazz more than ever before, to bring people - especially young women and men - together, to nurture freedom and dialogue, to create new bridges of respect and understanding, for greater tolerance and cooperation, — Irina Bokova

...above all, let your focus be on remaining a full person. Take time for yourself. Nurture your own needs.
Please do not think of it as 'doing it all'.
Our culture celebrates the idea of women who are able to 'do it all' but does not question the premise of that praise. I have no interest in the debate about women doing it all because it is a debate that assumes that caregiving and domestic work are singularly female domains, and idea that I strongly reject. Domestic work and caregiving should be gender-neutral, and we should be asking not whether a woman can 'do it all' but how best to support parents in their dual duties at work and at home. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The tobacco control movement provides a good model for how to achieve massive societal changes. In 1965, over 50 percent of men and 34 percent of women smoked. By 2010, only 23.5 percent of men and 17.9 percent of women were smoking (CDC 2011). These numbers represent one of the twentieth century's most important public health achievements. — Anthony Biglan

We as women have so much cultural training (on top of whatever familial nurturing history we have) that pushes us to give nurture to everyone but our selves and to look for nurture from anyone but our selves. Practicing and developing our capacity to nurture our selves whenever we need nurturing is vital to our process of becoming more whole. Nurture from others can add on to and amplify what we do for our selves. But to take the very best care of our selves, self-nurturing is the essential baseline from which we must start. As — Robyn L. Posin

I once taped a show in which a life coach discussed the concept of self-care - putting your own needs ahead of anyone else's - and the audience booed. Women were upset by the mere suggestion that they should put their needs before those of their children. I interrupted to explain: No one was saying you should abandon your children and let them starve, The life coach was suggesting that you nurture yourself so you'll have more nurturing to give to those who most need you. It's the airplane oxygen-mask theory: If you don't put on your mask first, you won't be able to save anyone else. — Oprah Winfrey

A woman is a symbol of nature; she has the beauty to attract and empower, the passion and compassion to create and nurture, and the power of love to transpire and transform. — Debasish Mridha

A lot of the women that I treat will tell me that when they talk to their siblings or mothers they very often have similar challenges. One could make the case that it's nurture, not nature because these twins were brought up together, but you can't rule out the genetic argument. — Laura Berman

Then, if women are to have the same duties as men, they must have the same nurture and education? Yes. The education which was assigned to the men was music and gymnastic. Yes. Then women must be taught music and gymnastic and also the art of war, which they must practise like the men? That is the inference, I suppose. I — Plato

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

When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abusive cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care. — Bell Hooks

Without women to nurture in this world, how do - how do men get by? How do children get by? How does society get by at all? — Raquel Welch

Women are more proactive. By their nature, they're genetically designed to nurture their offspring. Men have always been the hunters in their society. But it's changing. Women are now doing two things: They're building companies and they're giving birth to kids. — Horst Rechelbacher

Fathers' sharing in the birth experience can be a stimulus for men's freedom to nurture, and a sign of changing relationships between men and women. In the same way, women's freedom to give birth at home is a political decision, an assertion of determination to reclaim the experience of birth. Birth at home is about changing society. — Sheila Kitzinger

It is precisely women's experience of God that this world lacks. A world that does not nurture its weakest, does not know God the birthing mother. A world that does not preserve the planet, does not know God the creator. A world that does not honor the spirit of compassion, does not know God the spirit. God the lawgiver, God the judge, God the omnipotent being have consumed Western spirituality and, in the end, shriveled its heart. — Joan D. Chittister

In a sane world, love and sex would not divide by gender. We could love like and unlike beings, love them for a variety of reasons. The battered adjectives for homosexuality
queer, lesbian, gay
would disappear and we would only have people making love in different ways, with different body parts. We are too far gone with overpopulation to insist that procreation be an immutable part of desire. Desire needs only itself, not the proof of a baby. We would do well to baby each other instead of making all these unwanted babies that no one has time to nurture or to love.
At this point in my life, I am blessed by my friendships with women. I make no distinction between my gay and straight women friends. I hat the very terms, feeling that any of us could be anything
if we were to unlock the full range of possibilities within. — Erica Jong

If women are the earliest sources of emotional caring and physical nurture for both female and male children, it would seem logical, from a feminist perspective at least, to pose the following questions: whether the search for love and tenderness in both sexes does not originally lead toward women; why in fact women would ever redirect that search; why species-survival, the means of impregnation, and emotional/erotic relationships should ever have become so rigidly identified with each other; and why such violent strictures should be found necessary to enforce women's total emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men. — Adrienne Rich

The image of the Goddess inspires women to see ourselves as divine, our bodies as sacred, the changing phases of our lives as holy, our aggression as healthy, our anger as purifying, and our power to nurture and create, but also to limit and destroy when necessary, as the very force that sustains all life. Through the Goddess we can discover our strength, enlighten our minds, own our bodies, and celebrate our emotions. We can move beyond narrow, constricting roles and become whole. — Starhawk

Call it nature or nurture, there are differences in how men and women approach professional conduct, and facing these issues head-on will make us all more equipped to succeed. — Kathryn Minshew

Some security experts noted that the countries that nurture terrorists are disproportionally those where women are marginalized. The reason there are so many Muslim terrorists, they argued, has little to do with the Koran but a great deal to do with the lack of robust female participation in the economy and society of many Islamic countries. — Nicholas D. Kristof

The most basic parental bond is maternal. Equal parenting is great--it has forced men to get off their duffs--but women, from breast to cradle to cuddle, can nurture in ways that men cannot. — Charles Krauthammer

The challenge of ending displacement is inseparable from the challenge of establishing and maintaining peace. When wars end, farmers return to their fields; children return to school; violence against women declines; trade and economic activity resume; medical and other services become more accessible, and the international focus changes from relief to development and self-sufficiency. All this makes new wars less likely. It is a virtuous cycle that deserves nurture and support. — Kenneth Bacon

Feminists often discuss women having two jobs: work and children. True. But no one discusses those divorced and remarried men who have three jobs: work, and two sets of children to nurture and financially support. — Warren Farrell

Cooking was something women did to nourish and nurture their families, whereas for men it was largely something they did professionally to gain money and status. — Padma Lakshmi

Most of the people on the Cloud Ark were going to have to be women.
There were other reasons for it besides just making more babies. Research on the long-term effects of spaceflight suggested that women were less susceptible to radiation damage than men. They were smaller on average, requiring less space, less food, less air. And sociological studies pointed to the idea that they did better when crammed together in tight spaces for long periods of time. This was controversial, as it got into fraught topics of nature vs. nurture and whether gender identity was a social construct or a genetic program. — Neal Stephenson

Women retain their dependence needs long past the developmental point at which those needs are normal and healthy. Unbeknownst to others - and worse, unbeknownst to ourselves - we carry dependency within us like some autoimmune disease. We carry it with us from kindergarten through college and graduate school, into our careers, and into the convenient "arrangement" of our marriages. (...) Much of the time - for many of us, all of the time - our unwillingness to stand on our own two feet goes unnoticed because it's expected. Women are relational creatures. They nurture and need. This, we have been told for many, many years, is nature.
And although it cripples us, we have to let it go unquestioned. — Colette Dowling

In the winter of 1987 India was full of iskeems that had gone awry. Agricultural iskeems, political iskeems, economic iskeems, educational iskeems, stop black money iskeems, attract white tourists iskeems, drinkable water iskeems, animal protection iskeems, women's welfare iskeems, nurture children iskeems, don't scan female foetus iskeems, privatization iskeems, medical iskeems, entertainment iskeems, old India iskeems and new India iskeems.
We had mastered the art of nomenclature from the white man.
Grand labels could disguise unforgivable things. — Tarun J. Tejpal

And so you carried
life for the world, Mary,
as you fled,
to protect that very life
from threats of death.
Joining the world's mass of displaced people
you became
Refugee,
Alien,
Immigrant,
Homeless,
and settled in a foreign land--
the only place
to safely nurture
your fragile dream.
Like so many other women
who flee violence,
clutching their babies,
you crossed the border defining you
a stranger,
dependent on foreign aid, welfare
and hand-outs--
the charity of others--
to feed the Son of God. — Edwina Gateley

Permit me to bypass the entire nature vs. nurture "is gender really built-in?" debate with one simple observation: Men and women are made in the image of God as men or as women. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" (Gen. 1:27). Now, we know God doesn't have a body, so the uniqueness can't be physical. Gender simply must be at the level of the soul, in the deep and everlasting places within us. God doesn't make generic people; he makes something very distinct - a man or a woman. In other words, there is a masculine heart and a feminine heart, which in their own ways reflect or portray to the world God's heart. — John Eldredge

Bless all the women of this world who nurture our heritage while too many man rush off to kill for ideals that might now be deeply and personally held, but will often be viewed as repugnant by later generations. — Stephen Jay Gould

When I was working on my first novel, 'The Quilter's Apprentice,' I knew I wanted to write about friendship, especially women's friendship and how women use friendship to sustain themselves and nurture each other. — Jennifer Chiaverini

Everybody says women are like water. I think it's because water is the source of life, and it adapts itself to its environment. Like women, water also gives of itself wherever it goes to nurture life ... — Xinran

For real change, we need feminine energy in the management of the world. We need a critical number of women in positions of power, and we need to nurture the feminine energy in men. — Isabel Allende

We have to nurture our young women and understand the beauty and the strength of being a woman. It's kind of a catch-22: Strength in women isn't appreciated, and vulnerability in women isn't appreciated. It's like, 'What the hell do you do?' What you do is you don't allow anyone to dictate who you are. — Jada Pinkett Smith

In our minds lives the madonna image
the all-embracing, all- giving tranquil mother of a Raphael painting, one child at her breast, another at her feet; a woman fulfilled, one who asks nothing more than to nurture and nourish. This creature of fantasy, this myth, is the model
the unattainable ideal against which women measure, not only their performance, but their feelings about being mothers. — Lillian B. Rubin

Education, I said, and nurture: If our citizens are well educated, and grow into sensible men, they will easily see their way through all these, as well as other matters which I omit; such, for example, as marriage, the possession of women and the procreation of children, which will all follow the general principle that friends have all things in common, as the proverb says. That — Plato

It was an instant-fix afternoon quickie, and the Architect was a master of the kind. After I locked my front door after him, still radiant from recent orgasmic thrill, I had it all figured out: love yourself. Take care of yourself. Nurture yourself. Have your needs met; and everything will fit in its space. Eventually, if not earlier.
Yet, there was one thing I was unable to grasp:
How come men can do the nasty with their shoes on (how do they take their pants off?), yet they never fail to take off their handwatches? — Gina Wings

When fear overwhelms truth and love, we call it pain. Our spirit as women has all the knowledge and power we need to give birth and to nurture our babies. It is in our genetic coding. It has been there since the beginning of time. You can trust its wisdom. — Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa

Our culture encourages women to nurture men, making it predictable that many experience a seductive empathy for abusive men, as well as the misguided hope that love can obliterate an ugly past. — Leslie Morgan Steiner

A woman's love, like lichens upon a rock, will still grow where even charity can find no soil to nurture itself. — Christian Nestell Bovee

The discriminations that are found in the Muslim majority countries are more Cultural than Islamic.
...
I have always said to the Muslim women, please do not nurture the victim mentality. Stand up for your rights. — Tariq Ramadan

All human life on the planet is born of woman. The one unifying, incontrovertible experience shared by all women and men is that months-long period we spent unfolding inside a woman's body. Because young humans remain dependent upon nurture for a much longer period than other mammals, and because of the division of labor long established in human groups, where women not only bear and suckle but are assigned almost total responsibility for children, most of us first know both love and disappointment, power and tenderness, in the person of a woman. — Adrienne Rich

Nurture the Power & Wisdom of your Own Inner Strengths, with Good Intent. — Eleesha

Women who love women, who choose women to nurture and support and to create a living environment in which to work creatively and independently, are lesbians. — Blanche Wiesen Cook

For women to be supplying the soldiery with banners, flannel shirts and other material comforts was, superficially, all of a piece with their ministrations to their menfolk at home. Such contributions to the war effort were socially acceptable because they could be seen as an extension into the military sphere of the traditional female virtues of charity, nurture and needlework. Yet in reality what the women were doing represented the thin end of a far more radical wedge. Consciously or not, these female patriots were staking out a civic role for themselves. And many of them relished it. — Linda Colley

Sex and Intimacy Intimacy is the fiber that binds us to the people we love, and is built on time, investment, and honest communication. In a healthy long-term relationship, intimacy increases with time and many men and women are fortunate to have a lover who is also their best friend. Sex and romance are crucial for long-term intimacy. The stronger the sexual connection, the stronger the emotional intimacy will be. It is important to nurture and feed your relationship both emotionally and sexually. — Laura Berman

Women have a natural tendency to want to nurture and take care of men. You always think that the guy is going to end up coming around and that you're going to be the one that saves him - like the Oasis song. — Emma Watson

I am a monster. Not because I'm a product of my environment, or because I like to hurt women. I am a monster because I choose to embrace my darkness - I revel in it and nurture it like it's a newborn. I feed it regularly from the suffering of others, because that's what I do: I make those I love suffer. I betray everyone who ever wrongly put their trust in me. And at the end of the day, this girl will be no different. Because that's my special power; that's the one thing I'm truly good at - betrayal. — Anonymous

Sex is the strongest force in the universe. Forget about the Grand Unifying Theory, Stephen Hawking, I'll tell you what it is: women. Aren't women the strongest sex? What force is more magnetic than that? It's not just pussy. We're attracted to women for their energy. We're attracted to their fluidness, their ability to nurture a baby without even knowing how, to be able to put up with screaming and crying and colic and shitty diapers where men would go, "I'm fucking outta here! I'm gonna go kill me a saber-toothed woolly mammoth an'bring it on home to eat tonight. Wa-haaaaaa!" We don't have tits; we couldn't nourish a gnat. — Steven Tyler

Women are the ones that bear the greatest burden. We are also the ones who nurture societies. — Leymah Gbowee

For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection, which is so feared by a patriarchal world ... — Audre Lorde