Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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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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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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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.
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Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.
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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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Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.
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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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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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Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.
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The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.
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I would certainly like to see some young women take up psychoanalysis seriously and reconstruct it from an absolutely new viewpoint.
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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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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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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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Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.
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It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.
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It is impossible to do anything for anyone.
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A writer is hoisted up onto a pedestal only to scrutinize him more closely and conclude that it was a mistake to put him up there in the first place.
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Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient.
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The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.
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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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I discovered feminism around 1970-72-precisely the time when feminism began to exist in France. Before that, there was no feminism.
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To be feminist doesn't mean simply to do nothing, to reduce yourself to total impotence under the pretext of refusing masculine values. There is a problematic, a very difficult dialectic between accepting power and refusing it, accepting certain masculine values, and wanting to transform them. I think it's worth a try.
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Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.