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.

People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls.

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.

I was struck by the absence, even among very young boys and girls, of any interior motivation; they were incapable of thinking, of inventing, of imagining, of choosing, of deciding for themselves; this incapacity was expressed by their conformism; in every domain of life they employed only the abstract measure of money, because they were unable to trust to their own judgment.

Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.

To be feminist doesn't mean simply to do nothing, to reduce yourself to total impotence under the pretext of refusing masculine values. There is a problematic, a very difficult dialectic between accepting power and refusing it, accepting certain masculine values, and wanting to transform them. I think it's worth a try.

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