Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.
-
Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.
-
Let women be provided with living strength of their own.
-
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.
-
I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.
-
Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.
-
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.
-
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.
-
The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.
-
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.
-
Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.
-
Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I discovered feminism around 1970-72-precisely the time when feminism began to exist in France. Before that, there was no feminism.
-
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.
-
The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change.
-
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.
-
There is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.
-
Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.
-
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.
-
I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing.