“If I were the earth it would disgust me, all this vermin on my back, I’d shake it off.”

Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity.

One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.

I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.

Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.

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.

Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other.

One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others.

When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.

The sin of smiling whilst Louise was weeping, the sin of shedding my own tears and not hers. The sin of being another being.

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.

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

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

Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.

To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it’s hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.

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

Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make, And ev’n with Paradise devise the snake; For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man Is blackened – Man’s forgiveness give and take!

The cleverest woman on earth is the biggest fool on earth with a man.

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.

Whiteness is ownership of the earth.

The earth has disappeared beneath my feet, It fled from all my ecstasy. Now like a singing air creature I feel the rose keep opening.

Let tenderness pour from your eyes, the way sun gazes warmly on earth.

Up from Earth’s Centre through the Seventh Gate rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate; And many a Knot unravel’d by the Road; But not the Master-knot of Human Fate.