Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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What is an adult? A child blown up by age.
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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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Christian ideology has contributed no little to the oppression of woman.
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Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.
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If the writer is a woman, feminist or not, it will give the language something that it would not have if it had been used by a man.
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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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My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.
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In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider.
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It is for man to establish the reign of liberty in the midst of the world of the given. To gain the supreme victory, it is necessary, for one thing, that by and through their natural differentiation men and women unequivocally affirm their brotherhood.
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There are topics which are common to men and women. I think that if a woman speaks of oppression, of misery, she will speak of it in exactly the same way as a man. But if she speaks of her own personal problems as a woman, she will obviously speak in another way.
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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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If I were proud of anything in my life, it would be of our love. I feel we have to tell to each other as many things as we can, so we are not only lovers, but the closest of friends at the same time.
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Immortality is a terrible curse.
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One can not start by saying that our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends upon us to give it importance.
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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 curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength - each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving.
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I'm not against mothers. I am against the ideology which expects every woman to have children, and I'm against the circumstances under which mothers have to have their children.
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Old age is life's parody.
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The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams.
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As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.
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There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.
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Buying is a profound pleasure.
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Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately.
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All the idols made by man, however terrifying they may be, are in point of fact subordinate to him, and that is why he will always have it in his power to destroy them.