Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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It's frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself. It seems unfair. You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do --or don't do.
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That a whole part of the middle class detests me... is utterly normal. I would be troubled if the contrary were true.
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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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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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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 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 individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of himself.
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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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All oppression creates a state of war.
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He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!
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She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.
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From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.
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Choice springs from the totality of the person. Thus, to study, to analyze what a person is, does not eliminate the idea of freedom.
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You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde.
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Between women love is contemplative; caresses are intended less to gain possession of the other than gradually to re-create the self through her; separateness is abolished, there is no struggle, no victory, no defeat; in exact reciprocity each is at once subject and object, sovereign and slave; duality become mutuality.
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When Goya was 80 he drew an ancient man propped on two sticks, with a great mass of white hair and beard all over his face, and the inscription, "I am still learning."
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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.
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To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity.
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Patience is one of those feminine qualities which have their origin in our oppression but should be preserved after our liberation.
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There was a time, in the nineteenth century, for example, when women spoke mostly about the house, children, birth, and so forth, because it was their domain. That's changing a little, now.
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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.
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What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class.
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The renewed use of lobotomy today is particularly applicable to women: Because they do routine things, it is possible to take away their spirit of revolt, of debate, of criticism, and still leave them perfectly capable of making stews or washing dishes. It's terrible, this tendency to consider women something dangerous to society.
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Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.