Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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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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To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.
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Buying is a profound pleasure.
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Words have to murder reality before they can hold it captive.
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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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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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Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately.
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To be moral is to discover fundamentally ones own being.
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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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The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.
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We always come back to the same vicious circle - an extreme degree of material or intellectual poverty does away with the means of alleviating it.
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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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It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.
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The arrogance of some Christians would close heaven to them if, to their misfortune, it existed.
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Ah, if only there were two of me, she thought, one who spoke and the other who listened, one who lived and one who watched, how I would love myself! I would envy no one.
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In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.
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If women really did have complete equality with men, society would be completely overturned.
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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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Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.
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Christian ideology has contributed no little to the oppression of woman.
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Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.
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If you haven't been happy very young, you can still be happy later on, but it's much harder. You need more luck.
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Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity.
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In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider.