Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.
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It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.
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We belong to this earth. Now I can see the truth ... I love you on this earth of ours. Love me, do!
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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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I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth – and truth rewarded me.
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Anais Nin shows an occasional grace in writing, but her work is quite foreign to me, precisely because she wants so much to be feminine and not feminist. And then she is so gaga before so many men. She talks about men I know in France, men who were less than nothing, and she considers them kings, extraordinary people.
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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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Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.
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Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.
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I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.
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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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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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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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Cooking is revolution and creation.
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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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One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.
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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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When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.
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Society turns away from the aged worker as though he belonged to another species. That is why the whole question is buried in a conspiracy of silence. Old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization.
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Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside --from others. We do not accept it willingly.
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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 am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
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To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.
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There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem.