Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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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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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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She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.
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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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Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.
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One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.
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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 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.
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There are so many problems. Women can go to work on these as well without giving up their feminism.
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Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.
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It's only arrogance if you're wrong.
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I think that Freud understood absolutely nothing about women - as he himself said.
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Men create their own gods and thus have some slight understanding that they are self-fabricated. Women are much more susceptible, because they are completely oppressed by men; they take men at their word and believe in the gods that men have made up. The situation of women, their culture, makes them kneel more often before the gods that have been created by men than men themselves do, who know what they've done. To this extent, women will be more fanatical, whether it is for fascism or for totalitarianism.
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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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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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The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one.
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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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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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The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady, yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet.
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Harmony between two individuals is never granted-it has to be conquered indefinitely.
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Habit has a kind of poetry.
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To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.
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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.
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Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies.