Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
-
If women really did have complete equality with men, society would be completely overturned.
-
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.
-
I willingly trust myself to chance. I let my thoughts wander, I digress, not only sitting at my work, but all day long, all night even. It often happens that a sentence suddenly runs through my head before I go to bed, or when I am unable to sleep, and I get up again and write it down.
-
If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it "a discussion.
-
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.
-
This is certainly a very tricky point: How to ally yourself to other leftist forces without losing your feminist specificity.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
-
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.
-
My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together.
-
Marriage is traditionally the destiny offered to women by society. Most women are married or have been, or plan to be or suffer from not being.
-
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.
-
A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.
-
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.
-
In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.
-
The misfortune is that although everyone must come to death, each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.
-
All success cloaks a surrender.
-
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.
-
It is so difficult not to become vain about one's own good luck.
-
Words have to murder reality before they can hold it captive.
-
Anyway I know only too well that all life is nothing but a brief reprieve from death.
-
The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.
-
Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness.