[L]ove was an appalling bore once you had ceased loving. All that time wasted.

The misfortune which befalls man from his once having been a child is that his liberty was at first concealed from him, and all his life he will retain the nostalgia for a time when he was ignorant of its exigencies.

Why does one exist? That’s not my problem. One does exist. The thing to do is to take no notice but go at it on the run and to keep on going right on until you die.

Woman has always been man’s dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.

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.

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.

To show your true ability is always, in a sense, to surpass the limits of your ability, to go a little beyond them.

To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for the truth; and truth rewarded me.