A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong.
Ah, if only there were two of me, she thought, one who spoke and the other who listened, one who lived and one who watched, how I would love myself! I would envy no one.
Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside – from others. We do not accept it willingly.
For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay.
To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.
One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.
There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.
To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.
I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.
Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.
It’s not a very big step from contentment to complacency.
To give space when what one most yearns for is closeness, that is both the great test and great tragedy of love.
The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady, yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet.
From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.
When Goya was 80 he drew an ancient man propped on two sticks, with a great mass of white hair and beard all over his face, and the inscription, “I am still learning.”
It’s frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself. It seems unfair. You can’t assume the responsibility for everything you do – or don’t do.
Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one being active and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one.
It is a difficult matter for man to realize the extreme importance of social discriminations which seem outwardly insignificant but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature.
Woman has always been man’s dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.
Justice can never be done in the midst of injustice.