Welcome to the web’s most comprehensive site of quotations by women. 43,939 quotations are searchable by topic, by author's name, or by keyword. Many of them appear in no other collection. And new ones are added continually.

See All TOPICS Available:
See All AUTHORS Available:

Search by Topic:

  • topic cats
  • topic books
  • topic moon

Find quotations by TOPIC (coffee, love, dogs)
or search alphabetically below.

Search by Last Name:

  • Quotes by Zora Neale Hurston
  • Quotes by Louisa May Alcott
  • Quotes by Chingling Soong

Find quotations by the AUTHOR´S LAST NAME
or alphabetically below.

Search by Keyword:

  • keyword fishing
  • keyword twilight
  • keyword Australie

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

  • For though I'm black, yet am I also fair / and in my mortal form, Thine doth appear.

    • Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,
    • "The Divine Narcissus" (c. 1690), in Irene Nicholson, A Guide to Mexican Poetry ()
  • Rose-colored spectacles the hopeful wear ...

    • Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,
    • c. 1690, in Irene Nicholson, A Guide to Mexican Poetry ()
  • The arrogance of men, indeed, / comes full equipped with evil, / in promise and insistency, / the world, the flesh, the Devil.

    • Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,
    • c. 1690, in Irene Nicholson, A Guide to Mexican Poetry ()
  • Stupid men, who accuse / women without reason: / you've never noticed, I suppose, / it's you who taught the lesson. / If with an upsurge of desire / you storm her disapproval, / why would you have her be so good, / inciting her to evil? / You wear her last defenses down, / and then you gravely tell her / she's frivolous, though it was you / who caused harm to befall her.

    • Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,
    • "Hombres Necios" (c. 1690), in Irene Nicholson, A Guide to Mexican Poetry ()
  • ... I was not yet three years old when my mother determined to send one of my elder sisters to learn to read at a school for girls we call the Amigas. Affection, and mischief, caused me to follow her, and when I observed how she was being taught her lessons I was so inflamed with the desire to know how to read, that deceiving — for so I knew it to be — the mistress, I told her that my mother had meant for me to have lessons too. ... I learned so quickly that before my mother knew of it I could already read ...

    • Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,
    • 1691, in Margaret Sayers Peden, trans., A Woman of Genius: The Intellectual Autobiography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz ()
  • ... privation is the source of appetite.

    • Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,
    • 1691, in Margaret Sayers Peden, trans., A Woman of Genius: The Intellectual Autobiography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz ()
  • ... men, who merely for being men believe they are wise ...

    • Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,
    • 1691, in Margaret Sayers Peden, trans., A Woman of Genius: The Intellectual Autobiography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz ()
  • In loss itself / I find assuagement: / having lost the treasure, / I've nothing to fear.

    • Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,
    • "Disillusionment," in Alan S. Trueblood, trans., A Sor Juana Anthology ()
  • That you're a woman far away is no hindrance to my love: for the soul, as you well know, distance and sex don't count.

    • Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mexican poet, scholar, playwright, nun

(1651 - 1595)

Born: Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana.