Women are like that they don’t acquire knowledge of people we are for that they are just born with a practical fertility of suspicion that makes a crop every so often and usually right they have an affinity for evil for supplying whatever the evil lacks in itself for drawing it about them instinctively as you do bed-clothing in slumber fertilising the mind for it until the evil has served its purpose whether it ever existed or no.
Women are in a manner true to themselves even through their grossest deceit, because their actions are prompted by a natural impulse.
Woman is, as one may fay, master, a certain animal hard to be known, and whose nature is greatly inclined to mischief.[La femme est, comme on dit, mon maître, Un certain animal difficile à connaître, Et de qui la nature est fort encline au mal.]
Wives in their husbands’ absences grow subtler, and daughters sometimes run off with the butler.
With women, love always comes first.
With regard to power, women don’t have the vanity men have. They don’t need to make power visible, they only want the power to give them the other things they want. Security. Food. Enjoyment. Revenge. Peace. They are rational, power-seeking planners, who think beyond the battle, beyond the victory celebrations. And because they have an inborn capacity to see weakness in their victims, they know instinctively when and how to strike. And when to stop. You can’t learn that.
Why are women, so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
When women love, they forgive everything, even our crimes; when they do not love, they cannot forgive anything—not even our virtues.
When women are secretly to blame they often show ostensibly the utmost womanly pride. It is a dissimulation of mind for which we ought to be obliged to them. The deception is full of dignity, if not of grandeur.
When a woman says she will obey you, of her own will, it is time to sleep lightly and watch your back.
What woman, however old, has not the bridal favours and raiment stowed away, and packed in lavender, in the inmost cupboards of her heart?
We will not attempt to enumerate the women who are virtuous from stupidity, for it is acknowledged that in love all women have intellect.
