Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.

A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.

You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do or don't do.

One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.

Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies.

I think there is a great tendency toward autobiography among women today. It is perhaps facile - and I say that even though I have written one myself.

I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.