George Eliot Quotes on Woman (13 Quotes)

Confound you handsome young fellows! You think of having it all your own way in the world. You don't understand women. They don't admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.

Dorothea, he said to himself, was for ever enthroned in his soul: no other woman could sit higher than her footstool...

When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

I tell you there isn't a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it's bearing children, and they do that in a poor makeshift way it had better have been left to the men.

. . . he was gradually discovering the delight there is in frank kindness and companionship between a man and a woman who have no passion to hide or confess.

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles... but there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

Women should be protected from anyone's exercise of unrighteous power ... but then, so should every other living creature.

I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.

We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life -- some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed -- because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this defense against passionate affliction even more than men.