What is an adult? A child blown up by age.
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.
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.
To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.
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.
When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.
Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.
Art is an attempt to integrate evil.
The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.
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.
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.
The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.
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.
I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
