“Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgasmic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery.”

Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.

Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women’s magazines.

Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows.

He’s a male chauvinistic piglet.

Advice? I don’t offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.

…women who ‘adjust’ as housewives, who grow up wanting to be ‘just a housewife,’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps…they ate suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.

Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.

We broke through the feminine mystique and women who were wives, mothers and housewives began to find themselves as people. That didn’t mean they stopped, or had to stop, being mothers, wives or even liking their homes.

Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.

A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she “adjust” to prejudice and discrimination.

American women were frustrated in just the role of housewife – but they also managed to enlarge it. And they weren’t just housewives, they were community leaders.

You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.

No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.

If you were very bright and you became head of a department, as I did, of the psychology department, you were encouraged to go on to graduate work. But as a women you didn’t even think about discrimination.

By now, abortion should be obsolete. And I – and probably a lot of other feminists – wish it were obsolete, because abortion, in itself, is not a value – it is simply the right to chose, which is an essential value.

Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?

How quick the old woe follows a little bliss!

A musk deer searches for the source of the fragrance of musk, but it won’t find it because the fragrance comes from within itself. Bliss is not to be found outside of us; it exists within us.

Nearly all mankind is more or less unhappy because nearly all do not know the true Self. Real happiness abides in Self-knowledge alone. All else is fleeting. To know one’s Self is to be blissful always.

The mind is only a bundle of thoughts. The thoughts have their root in the I-thought. Whoever investigates the True “I” enjoys the stillness of bliss.

The seat of Realization is within and the seeker cannot find it as an object outside him. That seat is bliss and is the core of all beings. Hence it is called the Heart.

Silence is truth. Silence is bliss. Silence is peace. And hence Silence is the Self.

Because truth is exceedingly subtle and serene, the bliss of the Self can manifest only in a mind rendered subtle and steady by assiduous meditation.

To know one’s Self is to be blissful always.