"Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear without having so much as a smile for the young future."

"The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one."

"The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice."

"Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay."

"Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity."

"All oppression creates a state of war."

"It was an odd experience, this bringing to life of pages born of my pen and forgotten. From time to time they interested me -- they surprised me as much as if someone else had written them; yet I recognized the vocabulary, the shape of the sentences, the drive, the elliptical forms, the mannerisms. These pages were soaked through and through with my self -- there was a sickening intimacy about it, like the smell of a bedroom in which one has been shut up too long."

"In truth, to go for a walk with one's eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial, perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that right now they do most obviously exist."

"All the idols made by man, however terrifying they may be, are in point of fact subordinate to him, and that is why he will always have it in his power to destroy them."

"But an action which wants to serve man ought to be careful not to forget him on the way, if it chooses to fulfill itself blindly, it will lose its meaning or will take on an unforeseen meaning; for the goal is not fixed once & for all; it is defined all along the road which leads up to it."

"God! when you think of all the things you could do and yet somehow never do! All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn't come fast enough. Instead of being open, you're closed up tight. Thats's the worst sin of all - the sin of omission."

"In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome stubbornness is stupid."

"If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat."

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

"Alone: for the first time I understood the terrible significance of that word. Alone without a witness, without anyone to speak to, without refuge. The breath in my body, the blood in my veins, all this hurly-burly in my head existed for nobody."

"Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable."

"What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in."

"Woman is an eminently poetic reality since man projects onto her everything he is not resolved to be."

"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."

"The feminine body is expected to be flesh, but discreetly so."

"Art is an attempt to integrate evil."

"They use the pretext of avoiding war, to make you swallow any kind of peace, said Paul. They use the pretext of a revolution to involve us in any kind of war, said Jardinet."

"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."

"That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing."

"The present is a transitory existence which is made in order to be abolished: it retrieves itself only by transcending itself toward the permanence of future being; it is only as an instrument, as a means, it is only by it's efficacy with regard to the coming of the future that the present is validly realized: reduced to itself it is nothing , one may dispose of it as he pleases."

"Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it."

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

"It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills."

"He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!"

"Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death."

"Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth."

"Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen."

"No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility."

"How could women ever have had genius when all possibility of accomplishing a work of genius - or just a work - was refused them?"

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

"I didn't know the first thing about the people around me, but that didn't matter: I was in a new world; and I had the feelings that at last I had put my finger on the secret of freedom."

"This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate."

"The point is not for women simply to take power out of men's hands, since that wouldn't change anything about the world. It's a question precisely of destroying that notion of power."

"In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation."

"The adventure is which I have shared so passionately is not over--this adventure with its doubt, failure, the dreariness of no progress, then a glimpse of light, a hope, a hypothesis confirmed; and then after weeks and months of anxious perseverance, the intoxication of success."

"To lose confidence in one's body is to lose confidence in oneself."

"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's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion."

"There were no scruples, no feelings of respect or loyal affection that would stop us from making up our minds by the pure light of reason - and of our own desires."

"Vengeance is pointless, but certain men do not have a place in the world we sought to construct."

"The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women."

"One is not born a woman, but becomes one."

"Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying."

"Jaques was only what he was; but from a distance he became something more, became everything to me, everything I did not possess. It was to him I owed pains and pleasures whose violence alone saved me from the deserts of boredom in which I found myself bogged down."

"The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels."