Quote collection
355 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power."
"No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility."
"Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay."
"I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself"
"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion."
"All oppression creates a state of war."
"To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future."
"When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men."
"I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger."
"I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me."
"When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...]."
"As long as the family and the myth of the family ... have not been destroyed, women will still be oppressed."
"The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women."
"She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal."
"To show your true ability is always, in a sense, to surpass the limits of your ability, to go a little beyond them: to dare, to seek, to invent; it is at such a moment that new talents are revealed, discovered, and realized"
"Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms. For each of them, love would be the revelation of the self through the gift of the self and the enrichment of the universe."
"I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity."
"Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity. The evil all arose from the fact that he had increased his needs rather than limited them; . . . As long as fresh needs continued to be created, so new frustrations would come into being. When had the decline begun? The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution - not a social or political revolution - only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth."
"Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won."
"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 is even more deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence."