Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world. ~ ~ Gender and Empire

We think back through our mothers if we are women.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

Very few women yet have written truthful autobiographies.

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

The history of most women is hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence.

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published.

The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points. ~ Little Book of Bathroom Meditations

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. ~ Second Sex