Quotes for Women: Quotes to Recharge Your Spirit

Even in this day and age, women face discrimination and prejudice. Yet, women all over the world continue to work hard to make a difference -- to alter their lives and the lives of others. Here are some highly motivating quotes by women of substance. These women have spoken from their heart, and their words leave an indelible impression on the reader's mind.

Erica Jong, author
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, writer
Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.

Nadezhda Mandelstam, Russian writer, Hope Against Hope
I decided it is better to scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.

Dianne Feinstein, politician
[on women's role in government] Toughness doesn't have to come in a pinstripe suit.

Anne Frank, writer Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
Parents can only give good advice or put them[children] on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.

Eleanor Roosevelt, activist You Learn by Living
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, "I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along." You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Susan B. Anthony, feminist
It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.

Anne Frank, writer
In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death

Oprah Winfrey, American TV personality
As you become more clear about who you really are, you'll be better able to decide what is best for you - the first time around.

Indira Gandhi, Indian politician
You must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose.

Peace Pilgrim, spiritual leader
When you find peace within yourself, you become the kind of person who can live at peace with others.

Anne Frank, writer
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

Janis Joplin, American singer
Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got.

Dr. Joyce Brothers, American psychologist
Love comes when manipulation stops; when you think more about the other person than about his or her reactions to you. When you dare to reveal yourself fully. When you dare to be vulnerable.

Barbara De Angelis, American researcher
You never lose by loving. You always lose by holding back.

Dolores Huerta, activist
If you haven't forgiven yourself something, how can you forgive others?

Mother Theresa, social activist
I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much.

Joyce Carol Oates, writer
It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else's private world with our own.

Louisa May Alcott, American novelist
Love is a great beautifier.

Dolly Parton, singer
If you want the rainbow, you've got to put up with the rain.

Maya Angelou, poet, educator
You can write me down in history with hateful, twisted lies, you can tread me in this very dirt, but still, like dust, I'll rise.

Helen Hayes, American actress
Rest and you rust.

Kaethe Kollwitz, German artist
I am gradually approaching the period in my life when work comes first. No longer diverted by other emotions, I work the way a cow grazes.

Doris Lessing, writer The Golden Notebook
None of you [men] ask for anything -- except everything, but just for so long as you need it.

Bella Abzug, lawyer
We are coming down from our pedestal and up from the laundry room.

Susan B. Anthony, women's activist
There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.

Susan B. Anthony, women's activist
A woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself.

Ayn Rand, writer
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

Virginia Woolf, writer
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.

Maya Angelou, poet, educator
It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself, which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable.
Mother Theresa, social worker
We are all pencils in the hand of God writing love letters to the world.

Virginia Woolf, British feminist
It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Nancy Willard, American poet
Sometimes questions are more important than answers.

Emily Dickinson, poet
The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.

Betty Friedan, social activist, The Feminine Mystique
The problem that has no name -- which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities -- is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.

Jane Austen, novelist
She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older - the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning.

Martha Graham, dancer, choreographer
You are unique, and if that is not fulfilled then something has been lost.

Jennifer Aniston, American actor
The greater your capacity to love, the greater is your capacity to feel the pain.

Eleanor Roosevelt, activist
When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

Golda Meir, first female Prime Minister of Israel
Those who don't know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either.

Abigail Adams, second First Lady of the United States
[in a letter to John Adams] Deliver me from your cold phlegmatic preachers, politicians, friends, lovers and husbands.

Bette Davis, American actor
Old age is no place for sissies.

Golda Meir, address to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry
We only want that which is given naturally to all peoples of the world, to be masters of our own fate, only of our fate, not of others, and in cooperation and friendship with others.

Mother Theresa, social worker
If you judge people, you have no time to love them.

Sara Teasdale, poet
I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes.

Candace Pert, neuroscientist
Love often leads to healing, while fear and isolation breed illness. And our biggest fear is abandonment.

Muriel Spark, novelist, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
One's prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.

Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, leader of Burma's democracy movement
The education and empowerment of women throughout the world cannot fail to result in a more caring, tolerant, just and peaceful life for all.

Maya Angelou, writer
A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.

Eleanor Roosevelt, activist
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

Jane Goodall, English primatologist
Lasting change is a series of compromises. And compromise is all right, as long your values don't change.

Rosa Luxemburg, revolutionary
Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.

Mother Teresa, social worker
We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.

Peace Pilgrim, pacifist
Pure love is a willingness to give without a thought of receiving anything in return.

Gloria Swanson, American actress
[quoted in the New York Times] I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can't divorce a book.

Susan B. Anthony, Women's Activist
Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.

Maya Angelou, African American Poet
How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!

Germaine Greer, Academician, The Female Eunuch
Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a sub-humanly ugly mate?

Emily Dickinson, Poet
Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.

Martha Graham, American Choreographer
Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance. Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.

Marian Wright Edelman, American Activist, Families in Peril
We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily difference we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.

Diane Ackerman, Poet
[quoted in Newsweek, September 22, 1986] I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Activist
[Declaration of Sentiments, First Women's Rights Convention] We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Writer
Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real. Perhaps they are.

Ayn Rand, Novelist
Thinking men cannot be ruled.

Barbara Bush, First Lady
[at Wellesley College Commencement] Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the President's spouse. I wish him well!

Carrie Chapman Catt, Women's Rights Activist
[in a speech at the Senate] No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

Mary Wollstonecraft, Writer, A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority.

Margaret Thatcher, British Politician
In politics if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.

Susan Faludi, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
Feminism's agenda is basic: It asks that women not be forced to 'choose' between public justice and private happiness.

Whoopi Goldberg, American Actor
[quoted on the Today show] An actress can only play a woman. I'm an actor, I can play anything.

Simone de Beauvoir, French Author, The Second Sex
One is not born a woman, one becomes one.

Nadia Boulanger, Conductor
[on becoming the first woman to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra] I've been a woman for a little over 50 years and have gotten over my initial astonishment. As for conducting an orchestra, that's a job where I don't think sex plays much part.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Because man and woman are the complement of one another, we need woman's thought in national affairs to make a safe and stable government.

Nancy Reagan, Political Activist
A woman is like a tea bag. She only knows her strength when put in hot water.

Aristotle, Philosopher
If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.

James Thurber, American Humorist
I hate women because they always know where things are.

Malcolm de Chazal, Mauritian Writer
A woman knows how to keep quiet when she is in the right, whereas a man, when he is in the right, will keep on talking.

Jules Michelet, French Historian
Woman is a miracle of divine contradictions.

Freya Stark, Author
The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.

Gloria Steinem, American Feminist
Someone once asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don't have as much money. That was a true but incomplete answer. In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.

Gloria Steinem, Feminist
[speech at Yale University] Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.