A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.

Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear, without having so much as a smile for the young future.

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.

Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.

There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial...Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost...I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself!

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

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[...].