Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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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.
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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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This is certainly a very tricky point: How to ally yourself to other leftist forces without losing your feminist specificity.
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Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.
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Each of us is responsible for everything and to every human being.
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There are moments when you have to write certain things and you don't have to think of your sex. If you are writing about the population of the thirteenth district in Paris, even if you are writing on the women in the thirteenth district, there's no need to consider your sex.
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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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La femme?sait que quand on la regarde on ne la distingue pas de son apparence: elle est juge e, respecte e, de sire e a' travers sa toilette. Woman?knows that when she is looked at she is not considered apart from her appearance: she is judged, respected, desired, by and through her toilette.
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In order to be an artist, one must be deeply rooted in the society.
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Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.
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Feminism is a revolutionary movement which is different from the class struggle movement, the proletarian movement, but which is a movement which must be leftist. By that I mean at the extreme left, a movement working to overthrow the whole society.
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Sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.
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For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay.
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The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.
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Buying is a profound pleasure.
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Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness.
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Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately.
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To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.
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The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one.
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For years I thought my work still lay ahead, and now I find it is behind me: there was no moment when it took place.
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There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.
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Work almost always has a double aspect: it is a bondage, a wearisome drudgery; but it is also a source of interest, a steadying element, a factor that helps to integrate the worker with society. Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
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Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.
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No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.