It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.

It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.

On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself--on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.

There is a kind of universality in the human condition, masculine or feminine. That's one thing I continue to believe.

I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing.

When Goya was 80 he drew an ancient man propped on two sticks, with a great mass of white hair and beard all over his face, and the inscription, "I am still learning."

As long as the family and the myth of the family ... have not been destroyed, women will still be oppressed.