Great Throughts Treasury

"Let women be provided with living strength of their own. Let them have the means to attack the world and wrest from it their own subsistence, and their dependence will be abolished -- that of man also."

"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."

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

"Man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it."

"My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away."

"Many men hope that it will continue; not all have given up the battle."

"My overflowing leisure handed me the world and at the same time prevented me from seeing it. Just as the sun, filtering through the closed venetian blinds on a hot afternoon, makes the whole magnificence of summer blaze in my mind; whereas if I face its direct harsh glare it blinds me."

"Men of today seem to feel more acutely than ever the paradox of their condition. They know themselves to be the supreme end to which all action should be subordinated, but the exigencies of action force them to treat one another as instruments or obstacles, as means. The more widespread their mastery of the world, the more they find themselves crushed by uncontrollable forces."

"My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together."

"No matter what happened afterward, nothing would take those moments away from me; nothing has taken them away; they shine in my past with a brilliance that has never been tarnished. [About Liberation Day]"

"No one would take me just as I was, no one loved me; I shall love myself enough, I thought, to make up for this abandonment by everyone. Formerly, I had been quite satisfied with myself, but I had taken very little trouble to increase my self-knowledge; from now on, I would stand outside myself, watch over and observe myself; in my diary I had long conversations with myself. I was entering a world whose newness stunned me. I learned to distinguish between distress and melancholy, lack of emotion and serenity; I learned to recognize the hesitations of the heart, and its ecstasies, the splendor of great renunciations, and the subterranean murmurings of hope. I entered into exalted trances, as on those evenings when I used to gaze upon the sky full of moving clouds behind the distant blue of the hills; I was both the landscape and its beholder: I existed only through myself and for myself… My path was clearly marked: I had to perfect, enrich and express myself in a work of art that would help others to live."

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

"No woman wrote Procedure , Moby Dick or the Seven Pillars of Wisdom . They do not deny the human condition, because they begin to take it fully. This explains why his works lack the metaphysical resonance and humor black: they do not put the world in brackets, do not you ask questions, do not denounce the contradictions: take it seriously."

"On the evenings when my parents held parties, the drawing-room mirrors multiplied to infinity the scintillations of a crystal chandelier. Mama would take her seat at the grand piano to accompany a lady dressed in a cloud of tulle who played the violin and a cousin who performed on a cello. I would crack between my teeth the candied shell of an artificial fruit, and a burst of light would illuminate my palate with a taste of blackcurrant or pineapple: all the colors, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held the whole party in my mouth."

"On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in 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..."

"One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, "I will always be here.""

"Now I have no regrets, because things that do not exist for me, I think they are absolutely not."

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

"Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility."

"People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls."

"Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive."

"Practical reasons invoked against legal abortion have no weight, as to moral reasons, they reduce to the old Catholic argument: the fetus has a soul to heaven forbids that by removing it before the baptism. It should be noted that the church allows, occasionally, the death of grown men, in war or when it is put to death; reservation, however, to the fetus, an uncompromising humanitarianism."

"Ready-made phrases and the ritual of etiquette were unknown to him; his thoughtfulness was pure improvisation, and it resembled the little inventions affection inspires."

"Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom."

"Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself."

"Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it. Psychiatrists have told me that they give The Second Sex to their women patients to read, and not merely to intellectual women but to lower-middle-class women, to office workers and women working in factories. 'Your book was a great help to me. Your book saved me,' are the words I have read in letters from women of all ages and all walks of life."

"She offered her mouth to him, as if enchanted. A Persian princess, a little Indian, a fox, a morning glory, a lovely wisteria--it always pleased them when you told them they looked like something, like something else."

"Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap."

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

"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."

"She was beautiful, with a beauty so severe and so solitary that at first it was startling. "Ah! If only there were two of me," she thought, "one doing the talking and one listening, one living and one watching, how I would love myself. I'd envy no one.""

"She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life."

"She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust."

"She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal."

"Since I was 21, I have never been lonely. The opportunities granted to me at the beginning helped me not only to lead a happy life but to be happy in the life I led. I have been aware of my shortcomings and my limits, but I have made the best of them. When I was tormented by what was happening in the world, it was the world I wanted to change, not my place in it."

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

"Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority."

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

"Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside --from others. We do not accept it willingly."

"Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me"

"The answer is simple: he would always have to have been treated as a man. By the fate that it allots to its members who can no longer work, society gives itself away — it has always looked upon them as so much material. Society confesses that as far as it is concerned, profit is the only thing that counts, and that its "humanism" is mere window-dressing. In the nineteenth century the ruling classes explicitly equated the proletariat with barbarism. The struggles of the workers succeeded in making the proletariat part of mankind once more. But only in so far as it is productive. Society turns away from the aged worker as though he belonged to another species. That is why the whole question is buried in a conspiracy of silence."

"The body is the instrument of our hold on the world."

"The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project."

"The books I liked became a Bible from which I drew advice and support; I copied out long passages from them; I memorized new canticles and new litanies, psalms, proverbs, and prophecies, and I sanctified every incident in my life by the recital of these sacred texts. My emotions, my tears, and my hopes were no less sincere on account of that; the words and the cadences, the lines and the verses were not aids to make believe: but they rescued from silent oblivion all those intimate adventures of the spirit that I couldn’t speak to anyone about; they created a kind of communion between myself and those twin souls which existed somewhere out of reach; instead of living out my small private existence, I was participating in a great spiritual epic."

"The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion."

"The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy...It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present."

"The failure described in Being and Nothingness is definitive, but it is also ambiguous. Man, Sartre tells us, is “a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being.” That means, first of all, that his passion is not inflicted upon him from without. He chooses it. It is his very being and, as such, does not imply the idea of unhappiness. If this choice is considered as useless, it is because there exists no absolute value before the passion of man, outside of it, in relation to which one might distinguish the useless from the useful. The word “useful” has not yet received a meaning on the level of description where Being and Nothingness is situated. It can be defined only in the human world established by man’s projects and the ends he sets up. In the original helplessness from which man surges up, nothing is useful, nothing is useless. It must therefore be understood that the passion to which man has acquiesced finds no external justification. No outside appeal, no objective necessity permits of its being called useful. It has no reason to will itself. But this does not mean that it can not justify itself, that it cannot give itself reasons for being that it does not have. And indeed Sartre tells us that man makes himself this lack of being in order that there might be being. The term in order that clearly indicates an intentionality. It is not in vain that man nullifies being. Thanks to him, being is disclosed and he desires this disclosure. There is an original type of attachment to being which is not the relationship “wanting to be” but rather “wanting to disclose being.” Now, here there is not failure, but rather success."

"The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength, each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence."

"The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or castle; it stands for permanence and separation from the world."

"The day that you can love the woman in their entirety, in its weakness, not to escape herself but to find, not to resign but to say that day love will become for her. As for man, source of life and not mortal danger."