Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
-
To refuse everything, to say, even when there is something which really should be done, "Ah, that's no longer feminist," is a pessimistic, even masochistic tendency in women, the result of having been habituated to inertia, to pessimism.
-
Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.
-
Let women be provided with living strength of their own. Let them have the means to attack the world and wrest from it their own subsistence, and their dependence will be abolished -- that of man also.
-
Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.
-
Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.
-
I discovered feminism around 1970-72-precisely the time when feminism began to exist in France. Before that, there was no feminism.
-
To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity.
-
To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simpily an all-pervasive system.
-
Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.
-
Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.
-
Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient.
-
The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change.
-
There is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.
-
I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.
-
To create a language all of a piece which would be a women's language, that I find quite insane. There does not exist a mathematics which is only a women's mathematics, or a feminine science.
-
The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.
-
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.
-
The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.
-
Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.
-
The father's life is surrounded by mysterious prestige: the hours he spends in the home, the room where he works, the objects around him, his occupations, his habits, have a sacred character. It is he who feeds the family, is the one in charge and the head. Usually he works outside the home, and it is through him that the household communicates with the rest of the world: he is the embodiment of this adventurous, immense, difficult, and marvelous world; he is transcendence, he is God.
-
The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.
-
Women's mutual understanding comes from the fact that they identify themselves with each other; but for the same reason each is against the others.
-
We belong to this earth. Now I can see the truth ... I love you on this earth of ours. Love me, do!
-
Love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity.