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I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.
Simone de Beauvoir
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To refuse everything, to say, even when there is something which really should be done, "Ah, that's no longer feminist," is a pessimistic, even masochistic tendency in women, the result of having been habituated to inertia, to pessimism.
Simone de Beauvoir -
What would Prince Charming have for occupation if he had not to awaken the Sleeping beauty?
Simone de Beauvoir -
Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.
Simone de Beauvoir -
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.' There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Women's mutual understanding comes from the fact that they identify themselves with each other; but for the same reason each is against the others.
Simone de Beauvoir
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The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.
Simone de Beauvoir -
There is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The emancipation of women must be the work of women themselves, independent of the class struggle.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Anais Nin shows an occasional grace in writing, but her work is quite foreign to me, precisely because she wants so much to be feminine and not feminist. And then she is so gaga before so many men. She talks about men I know in France, men who were less than nothing, and she considers them kings, extraordinary people.
Simone de Beauvoir -
I think there is a great tendency toward autobiography among women today. It is perhaps facile - and I say that even though I have written one myself.
Simone de Beauvoir -
I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The human species is forever in a state of change, forever becoming.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.
Simone de Beauvoir
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The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Ce n'est gue' re que dans les asiles que les coquettes gardent avec ente" tement une foi entie' re en des regards absents; normalement, elles re clament des te moins. Women fond of dress are hardly ever entirely satisfied not to be seen, except among the insane; usually they want witnesses.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Let women be provided with living strength of their own. Let them have the means to attack the world and wrest from it their own subsistence, and their dependence will be abolished -- that of man also.
Simone de Beauvoir -
To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simpily an all-pervasive system.
Simone de Beauvoir