William Butler Yeats Quotes

To be born woman is to know - although they do not speak of it at school - women must labor to be beautiful.

Beautiful women must think about their beauty as capitalists think about their investments or politicians about their majorities; it is all they have to insure their places in the world.

It's fascinating how much of our sense of attractiveness and feminine identity is bound up in our hair.

Even if I weren't in Hollywood, I would feel pressure to look a certain way.

Americans like fat books and thin women.

I wonder if it is harder for a woman who was beautiful to get older or a woman who was never looked at.

I look at Jessica Alba and think she's got a great body. I think that's what women are supposed to look like.

Even my mother told me: 'You are a handsome woman, but you're not pretty. Pretty girls don't have those big bones.'

The pressure to keep up with what society tells us is perfect is causing us to enter a time when women are no longer women, but plastic shells of what women used to be.

I'm not homely enough to play the nerdy girl and not nearly pretty enough to play the pretty girl.

When I was growing up, one or two girls were beautiful, but it was not an aspiration, right?

It would be impossible to be a woman in Western culture and not have your own issues about your image and what you look like.

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

It's fine being stared at as a pretty girl, but not as a freak. When I tried to make myself ugly, they said, 'Oh, she's lost her looks.'

It's really, really tough being a woman. I think about getting work done all the time. Look at Nicole Kidman - her face is completely done.

A way a woman walks and talks and moves and behaves is completely connected to how she looks.

Growing up, and the way that the media portrays, you're supposed to look a certain way. Muscles aren't beautiful. Muscles aren't feminine.

By putting the spotlight on the female child and framing her as the ideal of beauty, he condemns the mature woman to invisibility. In fact, the modern Western man enforces Immanuel Kant's nineteenth-century theories: To be beautiful, women have to appear childish and brainless. When a woman looks mature and self-assertive, or allows her hips to expand, she is condemned ugly. Thus, the walls of the European harem separate youthful beauty from ugly maturity.

People talk of the pathos and failure of plain women; but it is a more terrible thing that a beautiful woman may succeed in everything but womanhood.

There's a lot more to being a woman than being 18 years old on the cover of Maxim magazine.

Women spend their lives trying to look good for men. So a woman who feels she's sending the right visual signals is pleased with herself.

The pressure is on the women to be particularly small, and then not only that, the whole package. It's extreme.

I have never met an ugly woman.

I was raised in the '50s. I was taught by my father that how I looked was all that mattered, frankly.

Not just as a black woman, but as a woman, since the beginning of time, beauty has been our responsibility.