Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.
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Live with no time-out.
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There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem.
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Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.
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The nearer I come to the end of my days, the more I am enabled to see that strange thing, a life, and to see it whole.
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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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To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.
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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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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.
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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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One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.
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Dwelling-place and food are useful for life but give it no significance: the immediate goals of the housekeeper are only means, not true ends.
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I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing.
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The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.
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Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours.
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It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.
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Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise.
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He formed his sentences hesitantly and then threw them at me with such force that I felt as if I were receiving a present each time.
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There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial...Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost...I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself!
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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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If you are writing something in which you are really involved, you don't even need to think about it any longer. The situation itself demands your total commitment as an individual, just as in your political commitments.
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From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.
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Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.
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I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.