Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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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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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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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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We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible.
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It's so easy to be mistaken about the future. Sometimes there are avant-gardes which believe themselves to be the avant-garde and which later find themselves to be absolutely dated.
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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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Picasso never thought of himself as avant-garde. I just find it a bad way to think of yourself.
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It is not mere chance that makes families speak of a child who is 'extraordinary for his age' and also of an old man who is 'extraordinary for his age'; the extraordinariness lies in their behaving like human beings when they are either not yet or no longer men.
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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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When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.
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The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it.
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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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The nearer I come to the end of my days, the more I am enabled to see that strange thing, a life, and to see it whole.
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Habit has a kind of poetry.
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Many things would be changed for Americans if they would only admit that there is ill-luck in this world and that misfortune is not a priori a crime.
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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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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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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 misfortune is that although everyone must come to death, each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.
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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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In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.
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...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.
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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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In 1949, I believed that social progress, the triumph of the proletariat, socialism would lead to the emancipation of women. But I saw that nothing came of it: first of all, that socialism was not achieved anywhere, and that in certain countries which called themselves socialist, the situation of women was no better than it was in so-called capitalist countries.