Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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To show your true ability is always, in a sense, to surpass the limits of your ability, to go a little beyond them: to dare, to seek, to invent; it is at such a moment that new talents are revealed, discovered, and realized.
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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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The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or castle; it stands for permanence and separation from the world.
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I like everyone who tries to show that madness is, in large part, conditioned by society and particularly by the family, and therefore, strongly affects women.
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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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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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When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.
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If the unconscious must express itself it will do so through the work that you do consciously or subconsciously, with words, with what you have to say.
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I willingly trust myself to chance. I let my thoughts wander, I digress, not only sitting at my work, but all day long, all night even. It often happens that a sentence suddenly runs through my head before I go to bed, or when I am unable to sleep, and I get up again and write it down.
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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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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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If you try consciously to be avant-garde, it's a little dangerous, like the present state of modern painting, where dealers try to be avant-garde, and under this pretext, painters take some old scraps and call it avant-garde.
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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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I never thought of myself as being in the avant-garde. I said what I had to say, as I was able to say it.
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That is what chills your spine when you read an account of a suicide: not the frail corpse hanging from the window bars but what happened inside that heart immediately before.
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She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life.
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Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.
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You can't address yourself to women by speaking a language which no average woman will understand. In my opinion, it's wrong.
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It's true that this is one of the problems which often arises among my radical, revolutionary feminist friends: Do you have to join the system or not? On the one hand, if you don't, you risk being ineffectual. But if you do, from that moment on, you place your feminism at the service of a system which you want to take apart.
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I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where i slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat.
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It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.
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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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I went to get a detective story. You have to kill time. But time will kill me too - and there´s the true, preestablished balance.
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The human species is forever in a state of change, forever becoming.