Quotes by 17th-century Women

Anne of Great Britain

Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles

Juana Inés de la Cruz

Aphra Behn

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Françoise d'Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon

Marie de Rabutin-Chantal

God hath put no such difference between the Male and Female as man would make.

My birth day. I am sixteen Years old. How many years have been past by me in thoughtlessness & vanity.

Elizabeth Fuller

Stricken by a guilty conscience, some men will say that I speak with excessive temerity about all men in general. They are greatly mistaken. If they behave justly, they will be protected from my attacks and those of others. I separate the just from the wicked (who are the subject of my discourse), since not all men are bad and not all women are good.

Arcangela Tarabotti

I find too there are few Friendships in the World Marriage-Proof; especially when the Person our Friend marries has not a Soul particularly capable of the Tenderness of that Endearment... we may generally conclude the Marriage of a Friend to be the Funeral of a Friendship...

Katherine Philips

How sweet is harmless solitude!
What can its joys control?
Tumults and noise may not intrude,
To interrupt the soul.

I have made a solemn vow never to send my drawings because people have cheated me. In particular, just today I found... that, having done a drawing of souls in Purgatory for the Bishop of St. Gata, he, in order to spend less, commissioned another painter to do the painting using my work. If I were a man, I can't imagine it would have turned out this way.

Artemisia Gentileschi

In loss itself I find assuagement: having lost the treasure, I've nothing to fear.

Juana Inés de la Cruz

For truly in nature there are many operations that are far more than mechanical. Nature is not simply an organic body like a clock, which has no vital principle of motion in it; but it is a living body which has life and perception, which are much more exalted than a mere mechanism or a mechanical motion.

Anne Conway (philosopher)

'Tis hard we should be by the men despised,
Yet kept from knowing what would make us prized;
Debarred from knowledge, banished from the schools,
And with the utmost industry bred fools.

Lady Mary Chudleigh

I shall I not equivocate, there is a meeting of men and women and there is a meeting only for women.

Anne Hutchinson

In things greate and extraordinary some perhaps will take notice of God's working, who either forgett or believe not that he takes as well a care and account of their smallest concernments...

Lucy Hutchinson

The Duke returned from the wars today and did pleasure me in his top-boots.

Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough

A year or two to come seems long, but twenty past as nothing.

Rachel Russell, Lady Russell

How many brave Men, courageous Women, and innocent Children did I see butcher'd, to do God good Service?... I went to the Irish Rebellion, where I saw more than three hundred thousand Souls murder'd in cold Blood.crying, Nits will become Lice, destroy Root and Branch: with a thousand other Barbarities, too tedious as well as too dreadful to repeat, beside what has been transacted abroad.

We are not indeed obliged always to speak what we think, but we must always think what we speak.

Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles

Whoever of ye Whigs thinks I am to be Hecktor'd or frighted into a Complyance tho I am a woman, are mightely mistaken in me. I thank God I have a Soul above that, & am too much conserned for my reputation to do any thing to forfeit it.

Anne of Great Britain

Ingratitude calls forth reproaches as gratitude brings renewed kindnesses.

Marie de Rabutin-Chantal

Time has the same effect on the mind as on the face; the predominant passion and the strongest feature become more conspicuous from the others retiring.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

One reproaches a lover, but can one reproach a husband, when his only fault is that he no longer loves?

Madame de La Fayette

Quieting an angry mob that thought her carriage was that of the Duchess of Portsmouth, Catholic lover of Charles II:

Pray, good people, be civil. I am the Protestant whore.

A little philosophy carries a man from God, but a great deal brings him back again.

It requires infinitely a greater genius to make love, than to make war.

Ninon de Lenclos

For certainly there cannot be a higher pleasure than to think that we love and are beloved by the most amiable and best Being.

When I behold the heavens as in their prime,
And then the earth (though old) still clad in green,
The stones and trees, insensible of time,
Nor age nor wrinkle on their front are seen

Anne Bradstreet

Some brains are barren grounds, that will not bring seed or fruit forth, unless they are well manured with the old wit which is raked from other writers and speakers.

Margaret Cavendish