Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.
This is certainly a very tricky point: How to ally yourself to other leftist forces without losing your feminist specificity.
The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady, yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet.
It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.
You can't address yourself to women by speaking a language which no average woman will understand. In my opinion, it's wrong.
Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.
One can not start by saying that our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends upon us to give it importance.
Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word. Machines won't change human nature.
there is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.
Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.
Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess.
It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.
Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.
I went to get a detective story. You have to kill time. But time will kill me too - and there´s the true, preestablished balance.
You have never had any confidence in him. And if he has no confidence in himself it is because he sees himself through your eyes.
I think it's wrong to write in a totally esoteric language when you want to talk about things which interest a multitude of women.
I discovered feminism around 1970-72-precisely the time when feminism began to exist in France. Before that, there was no feminism.
Every time a man dies, a child dies too, and an adolescent and a young man as well; everyone weeps for the one who was dear to him.
Women aren't more easily swayed by fascism than men, but I believe that their situation makes them in effect more slavish than men.
He formed his sentences hesitantly and then threw them at me with such force that I felt as if I were receiving a present each time
If the writer is a woman, feminist or not, it will give the language something that it would not have if it had been used by a man.
Patience is one of those feminine qualities which have their origin in our oppression but should be preserved after our liberation.
I would certainly like to see some young women take up psychoanalysis seriously and reconstruct it from an absolutely new viewpoint.
The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams.
Choice springs from the totality of the person. Thus, to study, to analyze what a person is, does not eliminate the idea of freedom.
If you are truly on the left, if you reject ideas of power and hierarchy, what you want is equality. Otherwise, it won't work at all.
One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.
The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.
The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them.
When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.
A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into?
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another.
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[...].
Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death.
The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.
As soon as a woman re- fuses to be perfectly happy doing housework eight hours a day, society has a tendency to want to do a lobotomy on her.
I am not at all for a feminism which is entirely separatist, which would say, "this domain is purely for women." I don't believe that at all.
He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!
Dwelling-place and food are useful for life but give it no significance: the immediate goals of the housekeeper are only means, not true ends.
Marriage is traditionally the destiny offered to women by society. Most women are married or have been, or plan to be or suffer from not being.
Old age is better for women than for men. First of all, they have less far to fall, since their lives are more mediocre than those of most men.
One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.
Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
Retirement revives the sorrow of parting, the feeling of abandonment, solitude and uselessness that is caused by the loss of some beloved person.
We always come back to the same vicious circle - an extreme degree of material or intellectual poverty does away with the means of alleviating it.
A man of the right doesn't write in the same way as a man of the left, you can see that right away, or a woman of the right or a woman of the left.
Women's mutual understanding comes from the fact that they identify themselves with each other; but for the same reason each is against the others.
A writer is hoisted up onto a pedestal only to scrutinize him more closely and conclude that it was a mistake to put him up there in the first place.