Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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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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A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong.
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Writing ... is a profession that can only be learned by writing.
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Literature in France seems to be undergoing a crisis now, and nothing comes immediately to mind.
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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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There are jobs that can be done equally well by men or by women and that finally you can't see a difference. But from the moment that you involve yourself fully in writing a novel, for example, or an essay, then you are involved as a woman, in the same way that you can't deny your nationality - you are French, you are a man, you are a woman... all this passes into the writing.
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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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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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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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Christian ideology has contributed no little to the oppression of woman.
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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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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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Immortality is a terrible curse.
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Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately.
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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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Buying is a profound pleasure.
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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.
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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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What is an adult? A child blown up by age.
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Old age is life's parody.
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No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.
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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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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.