Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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Women aren't more easily swayed by fascism than men, but I believe that their situation makes them in effect more slavish than men.
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This is certainly a very tricky point: How to ally yourself to other leftist forces without losing your feminist specificity.
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Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.
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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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Why does one exist? That's not my problem. One does exist. The thing to do is to take no notice but go at it on the run and to keep on going right on until you die.
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I could see no reason for being sad. It´s just that it makes me unhappy not to feel happy.
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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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I think that feminism permits women to speak among themselves, instead of simply being resentful, having personal complaints, which get them nowhere and which make them sick and ill-tempered, depressive and poison the lives of their husbands and children. It's much better to arrive at a collective consciousness of this problem, which is both a kind of therapy and the basis for a struggle.
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A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.
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Habit has a kind of poetry.
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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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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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Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one being active and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one.
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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.
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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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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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Each of us is responsible for everything and to every human being.
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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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One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.
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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 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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The individuals who seem to us most outstanding, who are honored with the name of genius, are those who have proposed to enact the fate of all humanity in their personal existences.