Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.
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The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.
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There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.
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History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.
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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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I consider it almost antifeminist to say that there is a feminine nature which expresses itself differently, that a woman speaks her body more than a man, because after all, men also speak their bodies when they write. Everything is implicated in the work of a writer.
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I think that Freud understood absolutely nothing about women - as he himself said.
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She offered her mouth to him, as if enchanted. A Persian princess, a little Indian, a fox, a morning glory, a lovely wisteria--it always pleased them when you told them they looked like something, like something else.
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To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.
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There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.
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Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.
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In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.
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I was struck by the absence, even among very young boys and girls, of any interior motivation; they were incapable of thinking, of inventing, of imagining, of choosing, of deciding for themselves; this incapacity was expressed by their conformism; in every domain of life they employed only the abstract measure of money, because they were unable to trust to their own judgment.
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All oppression creates a state of war.
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Obviously, everything has always been defined by the dominant ideology. But the dominant ideology has been able to accept women's literature as well as men's literature. I would say that women have been hindered from creating for a variety of reasons, as Virginia Woolf so admirably explained in A Room of One's Own. When they have created, on the whole they have been recognized. In literature it hasn't been nearly as oppressive as in, say, painting, where even the existence of so many women painters has always been denied.
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Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. But we have seen that it is one of the lies of the serious mind to attempt to give the word "useful" an absolute meaning; nothing is useful if it is not useful to man; nothing is useful to man if the latter is not in a position to define his own ends and values, if he is not free.
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That is what chills your spine when you read an account of a suicide: not the frail corpse hanging from the window bars but what happened inside that heart immediately before.
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Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess.
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A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.
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It is a difficult matter for man to realize the extreme importance of social discriminations which seem outwardly insignificant but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature.
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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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She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life.
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A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong.
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All success cloaks a surrender.