Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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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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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.
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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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Picasso never thought of himself as avant-garde. I just find it a bad way to think of yourself.
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Marriage is a career which brings about more benefits than many others.
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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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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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This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.
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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.
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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 am not at all for a feminism which is entirely separatist, which would say, "this domain is purely for women." I don't believe that at all.
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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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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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Justice can never be done in the midst of injustice.
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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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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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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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Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear, without having so much as a smile for the young future.
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Christianity gave eroticism its savor of sin and legend when it endowed the human female with a soul.
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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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Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.
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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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Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.
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She offered her mouth to him, as if enchanted. A Persian princess, a little Indian, a fox, a morning glory, a lovely wisteria--it always pleased them when you told them they looked like something, like something else.