Patty E

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Misogynists have often reproached intellectual women for 'letting themselves go'; but they also preach to them: if you want to be our equals, stop wearing makeup and polishing your nails. This advice is absurd. Precisely because the idea of femininity is artificially defined by customs and fashion, it is imposed on every woman from the outside[...]. The individual is not free to shape the idea of femininity at will.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“It requires courage not to surrender oneself to the ingenious or compassionate counsels of despair that would induce a man to eliminate himself from the ranks of the living; but it does not follow from this that every huckster who is fattened and nourished in self-confidence has more courage than the man who yielded to despair.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony: With Continual Reference to Socrates/Notes of Schelling's Berlin Lectures

“The body is our general medium for having a world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception