Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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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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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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Jealousy is not contemptible, real love has a beak and claws.
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I consider it almost antifeminist to say that there is a feminine nature which expresses itself differently, that a woman speaks her body more than a man, because after all, men also speak their bodies when they write. Everything is implicated in the work of a writer.
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She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life.
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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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I think that The Second Sex will seem an old, dated book, after a while. But nonetheless, a book which will have made its contribution. At least, I hope so.
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Why does one exist? That's not my problem. One does exist. The thing to do is to take no notice but go at it on the run and to keep on going right on until you die.
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When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.
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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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There are cases where the slave does not know his servitude and where it is necessary to bring the seed of his liberation to him from the outside: his submission is not enough to justify the tyranny which is imposed upon him.
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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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The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.
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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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People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls.
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Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.
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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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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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The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.
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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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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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In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.
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Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one being active and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one.
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There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.