“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.”

“--There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time.--But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.”

“Sex pleasure in women is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.”

“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 no to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.”

“To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.”

“But women do not say 'We', except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say 'women', and women use the same word in referring to themselves.”

“A life is such a strange object, at one moment translucent, at another utterly opaque, an object I make with my own hands, an object imposed on me, an object for which the world provides the raw material and then steals it from me again, pulverized by events, scattered, broken, scored yet retaining its unity; how heavy it is and how inconsistent: this contradiction breeds many misunderstandings.”