Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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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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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.
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Only a woman can write what it is to feel as a woman, to be a woman.
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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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Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.
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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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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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Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.
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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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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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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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It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.
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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.
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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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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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Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.
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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 emancipation of women must be the work of women themselves, independent of the class struggle.
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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.
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To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity.
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Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.
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The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation.