Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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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.
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Old age is better for women than for men. First of all, they have less far to fall, since their lives are more mediocre than those of most men.
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On the evenings when my parents held parties, the drawing-room mirrors multiplied to infinity the scintillations of a crystal chandelier. Mama would take her seat at the grand piano to accompany a lady dressed in a cloud of tulle who played the violin and a cousin who performed on a cello. I would crack between my teeth the candied shell of an artificial fruit, and a burst of light would illuminate my palate with a taste of blackcurrant or pineapple: all the colours, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held the whole party in my mouth.
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She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life.
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The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one.
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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.
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I am not at all for a feminism which is entirely separatist, which would say, "this domain is purely for women." I don't believe that at all.
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Harmony between two individuals is never granted-it has to be conquered indefinitely.
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A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.
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I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where i slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat.
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It must be said in addition that the men with the most scrupulous respect for embryonic life are also those who are most zealous when it comes to condemning adults to death in war.
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If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it "a discussion.
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It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.
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I think that Freud understood absolutely nothing about women - as he himself said.
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Habit has a kind of poetry.
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It is not mere chance that makes families speak of a child who is 'extraordinary for his age' and also of an old man who is 'extraordinary for his age'; the extraordinariness lies in their behaving like human beings when they are either not yet or no longer men.
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I think it's wrong to write in a totally esoteric language when you want to talk about things which interest a multitude of women.
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Eating, sleeping, cleaning - the years no longer rise up toward heaven, they lie spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won. Washing, ironing, sweeping, ferreting out rolls of lint from under wardrobes - all this halting of decay is also the denial of life; for time simultaneously creates and destroys, and only its negative aspect concerns the housekeeper.
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When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.
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There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.
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Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies.
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Many things would be changed for Americans if they would only admit that there is ill-luck in this world and that misfortune is not a priori a crime.
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The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.
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I think that The Second Sex will seem an old, dated book, after a while. But nonetheless, a book which will have made its contribution. At least, I hope so.