The advantage man enjoys, which makes itself felt from his childhood, is that his vocation as a human being in no way runs counter... to his destiny as a male. Through his identification of phallus and transcendence, it turns out that his social and spiritual successes endow him with a virile prestige. He is not divided. Whereas it is required of woman that in order to realize her femininity she must make herself object and prey, which is to say that she must renounce her claims as a sovereign subject. It is this conflict that especially marks the situation of the emancipated woman. She refuses to confine herself to her role as female, because she will not accept mutilation; but it would also be a mutilation to repudiate her sex. Man is a human being with sexuality; woman is a complete individual, equal to the male, only if she too is a human being with sexuality. To renounce her femininity is to renounce a part of her humanity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It seems, Euphranor..., that there is nothing so singularly absurd as we are apt to think, in the belief of mysteries; and that a ...man need not renounce his reason to maintain his religion. But if this were true, how comes it to pass, that, in proportion as men abound in knowledge, they dwindle in faith?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the ex...altation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men renounce whatever they have in common with women so as to experience no commonality with women; and what is left, according to... men, is one piece of flesh a few inches long, the penis. The penis is sensate; the penis is the man; the man is human; the penis signifies humanity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all, they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspiration, accept the actual fo...r the necessary and talk down to the young. Let them then become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, of the premature comforts of an acre, house, and bar...n? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the accumulated wealth of the past generations is thus tainted,--no matter how much of it is offered to us,--we must begin to c...onsider if it were not the nobler part to renounce it, and to put ourselves in primary relations with the soil and nature, and abstaining from whatever is dishonest and unclean, to take each of us bravely his part, with his own hands, in the manual labor of the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men do not believe in the power of education. We do not think we can speak to divine sentiments in man, and we do not try. We reno...unce all high aims.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In my dealing with my child, my Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my money stead me nothing; but as much soul as I have avai...ls. If I am wilful, he sets his will against mine, one for one, and leaves me, if I please, the degradation of beating him by my superiority of strength. But if I renounce my will, and act for the soul, setting that up as umpire between us two, out of his young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres and loves with me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »