Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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Patience is one of those feminine qualities which have their origin in our oppression but should be preserved after our liberation.
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I never thought of myself as being in the avant-garde. I said what I had to say, as I was able to say it.
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The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself.
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One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.
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Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself.
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Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.
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A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into?
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People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls.
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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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I think that Freud understood absolutely nothing about women - as he himself said.
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To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.
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A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.
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It's frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself. It seems unfair. You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do --or don't do.
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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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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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All success cloaks a surrender.
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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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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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A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.
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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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The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy...It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present.
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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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Anyway I know only too well that all life is nothing but a brief reprieve from death.