“Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects.”

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

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.

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth – and truth rewarded me.

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

We know that equality of individual ability has never existed and never will, but we do insist that equality of opportunity still must be sought.

I don’t like the idea of the black race being diluted out of existence. I like the idea of all of us being here.

The inner light actually comes from the soul; it is already inside us. The moment we can have free access to our soul, we will see that this light is coming to the fore to permeate our whole outer existence.

Everywhere the need exists for maternal sympathy and help.

There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed.

I think I was always looking for that perfect woman, who obviously doesn’t exist. I wanted to be married. I wanted more kids. I’m a family man, at heart.

True perfection consists in the love of God and our neighbour, and the better we keep both these commandments, the more perfect we shall be.

Weakness or strength: you exist, that is strength. You don’t know where you are going or why you are going, go in everywhere, answer everyone. No one will kill you, any more than if you were a corpse.