Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Jealousy is not contemptible, real love has a beak and claws.
-
Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.
-
Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself - exactly oneself and no one else - and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else.
-
She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust.
-
It is doubtless impossible to approach any human problems with a mind free from bias.
-
It's true that what you find in New York is something other than America. Only small towns and small countries are self-satisfied; a real capital goes beyond its borders.
-
On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself – on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.
-
There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem.
-
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.
-
When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.
-
It's only arrogance if you're wrong.
-
Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.
-
Women aren't more easily swayed by fascism than men, but I believe that their situation makes them in effect more slavish than men.
-
There is a kind of universality in the human condition, masculine or feminine. That's one thing I continue to believe.
-
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.
-
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.
-
We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible.
-
To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.