Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.

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.

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.

Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.

One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.