To will freedom and to will to disclose being are one and the same choice; hence, freedom takes a positive and constructive step which causes being to pass to existence in a movement which is constantly surpassed.
It is doubtless impossible to approach any human problems with a mind free from bias.
It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.
Old age was growing inside me. It kept catching my eye from the depths of the mirror. I was paralyzed sometimes as I saw it making its way toward me so steadily when nothing inside me was ready for it.
The nearer I come to the end of my days, the more I am enabled to see that strange thing, a life, and to see it whole...
The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength – each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving.
It’s only arrogance if you’re wrong.
Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient.
If you haven’t been happy very young, you can still be happy later on, but it’s much harder. You need more luck.
Christianity gave eroticism its savor of sin and legend when it endowed the human female with a soul.
Let women be provided with living strength of their own. Let them have the means to attack the world and wrest from it their own subsistence, and their dependence will be abolished – that of man also.
The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.
One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.
To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity.
A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.
The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change.
I’m not against mothers. I am against the ideology which expects every woman to have children, and I’m against the circumstances under which mothers have to have their children.
The human species is forever in a state of change, forever becoming.
Anyway I know only too well that all life is nothing but a brief reprieve from death.
Love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity.