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.

It's only arrogance if you're wrong.

Jealousy is not contemptible, real love has a beak and claws.

Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.

There are jobs that can be done equally well by men or by women and that finally you can't see a difference. But from the moment that you involve yourself fully in writing a novel, for example, or an essay, then you are involved as a woman, in the same way that you can't deny your nationality - you are French, you are a man, you are a woman... all this passes into the writing.

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.

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.