Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
-
And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.
-
Most feminists in France came to feminism after '68 as a result of the hypocrisy they experienced in leftist movements. In these movements, where everyone believed there was going to be true equality, fraternity between men and women, and that together they were going to struggle against this rotten society, even there they noticed that the leftists, the militants, kept them "in their place." Women made the coffee while the others did the talking; they were the ones who typed the letters.
-
Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.
-
Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me.
-
A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.
-
Virginia Woolf thought a lot about her own sex when she wrote. In the best sense of the word, her writing is very feminine, and by that I mean that women are supposed to be very sensitive to all the sensations of nature, much more so than men, much more contemplative. It's this quality that marks her best works.
-
When an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior.
-
There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.
-
Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.
-
There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time. --But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.
-
I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself
-
The innumerable conflicts that set men and women against one another come from the fact that neither is prepared to assume all the consequences of this situation which the one has offered and the other accepted.
-
The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another.
-
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
-
Old age was growing inside me. It kept catching my eye from the depths of the mirror. I was paralyzed sometimes as I saw it making its way toward me so steadily when nothing inside me was ready for it.
-
It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.
-
I would certainly like to see some young women take up psychoanalysis seriously and reconstruct it from an absolutely new viewpoint.
-
If you are truly on the left, if you reject ideas of power and hierarchy, what you want is equality. Otherwise, it won't work at all.
-
Let women be provided with living strength of their own.
-
Sometimes you can accept an important post, on condition that it really puts you in a position to help women. Unfortunately, women who have important posts very often adopt masculine standards-power, ambition, personal success - and cut themselves off from other women.
-
Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.
-
Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.
-
Every time a man dies, a child dies too, and an adolescent and a young man as well; everyone weeps for the one who was dear to him.
-
To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.