Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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It's important that you think of your relationship with the world and the way you can express that world and that you not be stopped if it scandalizes or embarrasses; but you must not look for scandal or for the avant-garde as a thing in itself.
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I think there is a great tendency toward autobiography among women today. It is perhaps facile - and I say that even though I have written one myself.
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From one minute to the next the present is merely an honorary past. It must be filled unceasingly anew to dissemble the curse it carries within itself; that is why Americans like speed, alcohol, thriller films and any sensational news: the demand for new things, and ever newer things, is feverish since nowhere will they rest.
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Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies.
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However gifted an individual is at the outset, if his or her talents cannot be developed because of his or her social condition, because of the surrounding circumstances, these talents will be still-born.
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They Americans want to believe that Good and Evil can be defined in precise categories, that Good is already, or will be easily achieved. ... if this optimism appears too superficial, they will try to create a kind of anti-God: the U.S.S.R. That is Evil, and it only needs to be annihilated to re-establish the reign of Good.
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It is doubtless impossible to approach any human problems with a mind free from bias.
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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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Each person has his or her own very particular history and after all, the unconscious is the most secret part of ourselves.
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Jealousy is not contemptible, real love has a beak and claws.
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One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.
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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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There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.
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The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady, yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet.
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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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Harmony between two individuals is never granted-it has to be conquered indefinitely.
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Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.
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Tragedies are all right for a while: you are concerned, you are curious, you feel good. And then it gets repetitive, it doesn't advance, it grows dreadfully boring: it is so very boring, even for me.
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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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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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...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.
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A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself.
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She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life.
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Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.