Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.
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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.
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I admire Freud a great deal as a person and thinker. Despite everything, I find his work very, very rich, but I think that for women he has been absolutely disastrous. And even more so, everyone who came after him.
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There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.
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The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another.
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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.
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No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.
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When an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior.
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Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.
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Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
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Let women be provided with living strength of their own.
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The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.
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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.
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Art is an attempt to integrate evil.
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But I must admit I didn´t like that idea; do the same thing as everyone else. Eating to live, living to eat - that had been the nightmare of my adolescence. If it meant going back to that, if would be just as well to turn on the gas at once. But I suppose everyone thinks of things like that: let´s turn on the gas at once. And you don´t turn it on.
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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.
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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.
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There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.' There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me.
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Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, "I don't want to be just another blade of grass."
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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.
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To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.
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The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.
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The emancipation of women must be the work of women themselves, independent of the class struggle.
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It is impossible to do anything for anyone.