Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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Feminism is one way of attacking society as it now exists.
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It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.
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Given masculine norms, it is clear that women are more likely to be considered crazy - I'm not saying to be crazy.
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Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity. The evil all arose from the fact that he had increased his needs rather than limited them; . . . As long as fresh needs continued to be created, so new frustrations would come into being. When had the decline begun? The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution - not a social or political revolution - only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.
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Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word. Machines won't change human nature.
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To give space when what one most yearns for is closeness, that is both the great test and great tragedy of love.
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The time that one gains cannot be accumulated in a storehouse; it is contradictory to want to save up existence, which, the fact is, exists only by being spent and there is a good case for showing that airplanes, machines, the telephone, and the radio do not make men of today happier than those of former times.
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…but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.
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Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.
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The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.
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She was trying to get rid of a religious hangover.
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To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.
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Can one say that there is a way of crying out, of speaking, which is properly feminine? Personally, I don't think so. In the end, I find this is another way of putting women in a kind of singularity, a ghetto, which is not what I want. I want them to be singular and universal at the same time.
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Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms. For each of them, love would be the revelation of the self through the gift of the self and the enrichment of the universe.
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Virginia Woolf thought a lot about her own sex when she wrote. In the best sense of the word, her writing is very feminine, and by that I mean that women are supposed to be very sensitive to all the sensations of nature, much more so than men, much more contemplative. It's this quality that marks her best works.
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I was very fond of Lagneau’s phrase: “I have no comfort but in my absolute despair.
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As soon as a woman re- fuses to be perfectly happy doing housework eight hours a day, society has a tendency to want to do a lobotomy on her.
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Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other.
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Truthfully speaking, women are dangerous, even those who aren't feminists, because there has always been a women's revolt. Only it has usually translated itself into solitary, individualist, disagreeable manifestations - the whole history of the taming of the shrew, the woman-shrew. They weren't shrews without cause.
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Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen.
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The state of emotional intoxication allows one to grasp existence in one's self and in the other, as both subjectivity and passivity. The two partners merge in this ambiguous unity; each one is freed of his own presence and achieves immediate communication with the other.
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To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.
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I don't want to be just another blade of grass.
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And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.