“If you point out that they’re walking in shit they scream it’s you that have dirty feet.”

Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.

Death itself does not frighten me; it is the jump I am afraid of.

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

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

That the child is the supreme aim of woman is a statement having precisely the value of an advertising slogan.

Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you’ve lost that, you’ve lost everything.

You said something very true the other day: that for us, nudity begins with the face.

But it is impossible for anyone to say ‘I am sacrificing myself’ without feeling bitterness.

There’s something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.

Weakness’ is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.

I enjoyed my exhaustion, though; I liked overdoing things.

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 absolute truth.

If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression.

All success cloaks a surrender.

Girls are weighed down by restrictions, boys with demands – two equally harmful disciplines.

I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself.

You can spend a lot of time placing blame on others when you’re the only one standing in your way.

Blaming things on the past does not make them better.

I used to blame everything outside of me for my lack of progress until I found that my problem was inside.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are.

I have nothing in common with lazy people who blame others for their lack of success.

In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel.

The fault is in the one who blames. Spirit sees nothing to criticize.

To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West – know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.