“I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.”

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.

There is tonic in the things that men do not love to hear. Free speech is to a great people what the winds are to oceans and where free speech is stopped miasma is bred, and death comes fast.

She is content, free and breathing with ease, the reward of her patience.

You don’t sacrifice your individuality; you sacrifice a lot of freedom.

At my lemonade stand I used to give the first glass away free and charge five dollars for the second glass. The refill contained the antidote.

The liberty to make our laws does not give us the freedom nor the license to break our laws!

Freedom is a spontaneous letting go of all desire and effort.

Everyone has freedom to say whatever they want to say. I think it takes a stronger person to hold their tongue as opposed to speaking out.

True obedience is true freedom.