Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.
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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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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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History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.
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Justice can never be done in the midst of injustice.
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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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There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem.
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It is a difficult matter for man to realize the extreme importance of social discriminations which seem outwardly insignificant but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature.
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A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.
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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.
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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.
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Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself.
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All success cloaks a surrender.
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Choice springs from the totality of the person. Thus, to study, to analyze what a person is, does not eliminate the idea of freedom.
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La femme?sait que quand on la regarde on ne la distingue pas de son apparence: elle est juge e, respecte e, de sire e a' travers sa toilette. Woman?knows that when she is looked at she is not considered apart from her appearance: she is judged, respected, desired, by and through her toilette.
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The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.
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In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.
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Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. But we have seen that it is one of the lies of the serious mind to attempt to give the word "useful" an absolute meaning; nothing is useful if it is not useful to man; nothing is useful to man if the latter is not in a position to define his own ends and values, if he is not free.
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People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls.
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Obviously, everything has always been defined by the dominant ideology. But the dominant ideology has been able to accept women's literature as well as men's literature. I would say that women have been hindered from creating for a variety of reasons, as Virginia Woolf so admirably explained in A Room of One's Own. When they have created, on the whole they have been recognized. In literature it hasn't been nearly as oppressive as in, say, painting, where even the existence of so many women painters has always been denied.
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Old age is better for women than for men. First of all, they have less far to fall, since their lives are more mediocre than those of most men.
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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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It's frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself. It seems unfair. You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do --or don't do.
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If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it "a discussion.