Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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I think that feminism permits women to speak among themselves, instead of simply being resentful, having personal complaints, which get them nowhere and which make them sick and ill-tempered, depressive and poison the lives of their husbands and children. It's much better to arrive at a collective consciousness of this problem, which is both a kind of therapy and the basis for a struggle.
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Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.
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The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.
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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 tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth – and truth rewarded me.
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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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We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible.
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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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It's only arrogance if you're wrong.
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Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.
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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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There is a kind of universality in the human condition, masculine or feminine. That's one thing I continue to believe.
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Habit has a kind of poetry.
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When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.
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A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself.
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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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The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.
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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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I could see no reason for being sad. It´s just that it makes me unhappy not to feel happy.
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Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.
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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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Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.
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Women aren't more easily swayed by fascism than men, but I believe that their situation makes them in effect more slavish than men.
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It must be said in addition that the men with the most scrupulous respect for embryonic life are also those who are most zealous when it comes to condemning adults to death in war.