Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.

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.

A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong.

Harmony between two individuals is never granted-it has to be conquered indefinitely.

To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.

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.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.