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Nature asserts itself in the face of Spirit which it denies while assuming it; the individual is again found in the collectivity within which he is lost; & each man's death is fulfilled by being cancelled out into the Life of Mankind. -- Simone De Beauvoir
By the time humankind reaches the stage of writing its mythology and laws, patriarchy is definitively established: it is males who write the codes. -- Simone De Beauvoir
A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into? -- Simone De Beauvoir
Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams. -- Simone De Beauvoir
A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. -- Simone De Beauvoir
One night I summoned God, if He really existed, to show Himself to me. He didn't, and I never addressed another word to Him. In my heart of hearts I was very glad He didn't exist. I should have hated it if what was going on here below had had to end up in eternity. -- Simone De Beauvoir
In real life, and usually in good novels and films, individuals are not defined only by their sexuality. Each has a history, and his or her eroticism is involved in a certain situation. It may even be that situation creates it. -- Simone De Beauvoir
She had appetites in plenty: she spent all her strength in repressing them and she underwent this denial in anger. -- Simone De Beauvoir
No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. -- Simone De Beauvoir
I didn't know the first thing about the people around me, but that didn't matter: I was in a new world; and I had the feelings that at last I had put my finger on the secret of freedom. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Primitive people alienate themselves in their mana, their totem; civilized people in their individual souls, their egos, their names, their possessions, and their work: here is the first temptation of inauthenticity. -- Simone De Beauvoir
My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The fear of death never left me; I couldn't get used to the thought; I would still sometimes shake and weep with terror. By contrast, the fact of existence here and now sometimes took on a glorious splendour. -- Simone De Beauvoir
One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, I will always be here. -- Simone De Beauvoir
As far as I am concerned sexuality no longer exists. I used to call this indifference serenity: all at once I have come to see it in another light - it is a mutilation; it is the loss of a sense. The lack of it makes me blind to the needs, the pains, and the joys of those who do possess it. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart. -- Simone De Beauvoir
And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living. -- Simone De Beauvoir
I love you, with a touch of tragedy and quite madly. -- Simone De Beauvoir
My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly. Let but the future be opened to her, and she will no longer be compelled to linger in the present. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The adventure is which I have shared so passionately is not over
this adventure with its doubt, failure, the dreariness of no progress, then a glimpse of light, a hope, a hypothesis confirmed; and then after weeks and months of anxious perseverance, the intoxication of success. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
What do you believe in ?"
"People's sufferings, and the fact that it is abominable. One should do everything to abolish it. To tell you the truth, nothing else seems to me of any importance. -- Simone De Beauvoir
In the old days the worst part of my depression used to be the astonishment it caused me, the scandalized way in which I fought against it. Nowadays, on the other hand, I accept it cheerfully enough, like an old familiar friend. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Life has made me discover the world as it is, that is, a world of suffering and oppression, of undernourishment for the majority of people, things that I didn't know when I was young and when I imagined that to discover the world was to discover something beautiful. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Alone: for the first time I understood the terrible significance of that word. Alone without a witness, without anyone to speak to, without refuge. The breath in my body, the blood in my veins, all this hurly-burly in my head existed for nobody. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Ready-made phrases and the ritual of etiquette were unknown to him; his thoughtfulness was pure improvisation, and it resembled the little inventions affection inspires. -- Simone De Beauvoir
There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time.
But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
To will freedom and to will to disclose being are one and the same choice; hence, freedom takes a positive and constructive step which causes being to pass to existence in a movement which is constantly surpassed. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Ephemeral and useless, flowers exemplify the gratuitousness of occasions that mean expenses and luxury; blooming in vases, doomed to a rapid death, flowers are ceremonial bonfires, incense and myrrh, libation, sacrifice. -- Simone De Beauvoir
For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Always the same faces, the same surroundings, the same conversations, the same problems. The more it changes, the more it repeats itself. In the end, you feel as if you're dying alive. -- Simone De Beauvoir
I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself -- Simone De Beauvoir
No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or castle; it stands for permanence and separation from the world. -- Simone De Beauvoir
But what does the word insist mean after a whole life of love and understanding? I have never asked anything for myself that I did not also wish for him. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
A writer is hoisted up onto a pedestal only to scrutinize him more closely and conclude that it was a mistake to put him up there in the first place. -- Simone De Beauvoir
To lose confidence in one's body is to lose confidence in oneself. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Jaques was only what he was; but from a distance he became something more, became everything to me, everything I did not possess. It was to him I owed pains and pleasures whose violence alone saved me from the deserts of boredom in which I found myself bogged down. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The state of emotional intoxication allows one to grasp existence in one's self and in the other, as both subjectivity and passivity. The two partners merge in this ambiguous unity; each one is freed of his own presence and achieves immediate communication with the other. -- Simone De Beauvoir
He would talk and talk and talk; the twilight would fill with cigarette smoke and shimmering words would tremble in the blue coils of air... -- Simone De Beauvoir
There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial ... Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost ... I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself! -- Simone De Beauvoir
Be loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody. -- Simone De Beauvoir
She was trying to get rid of a religious hangover. -- Simone De Beauvoir
It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world. -- Simone De Beauvoir
One is not born a woman, but becomes one. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
If it is said men oppress women, the husband reacts indigntantly; he feels oppressed: he is; but in fact, it is the masculine code, the society developed by males and in their interest, that has defined the feminine condition in a form that is now for both sexes a source of distress. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady, yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Yet a revolution cannot begin until the diffuse, private indignation of individuals coalesces into a common cause. Beauvoir not only marshaled -- Simone De Beauvoir
The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return. -- Simone De Beauvoir
We always come back to the same vicious circle - an extreme degree of material or intellectual poverty does away with the means of alleviating it. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Literature isn't necessarily pleasant,' he said.
'But it is!' Lambert said. 'Even things that are sad become pleasant when they are done artistically.' He hesitated. 'Maybe pleasant isn't exactly the right word, but it'll do. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Being on the fringes of the world is not the best place for someone who intends to re-create it: here again, to go beyond the given, one must be deeply rooted in it. Personal accomplishments are almost impossible in human categories collectively kept in an inferior situation. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The tie that binds her to her oppressors is unlike any other. The division of the sexes is a biological given, not a moment in human history. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Every time a man dies, a child dies too, and an adolescent and a young man as well; everyone weeps for the one who was dear to him. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you've lost that, you've lost everything. -- Simone De Beauvoir
That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing. -- Simone De Beauvoir
There was still a question in her eyes
one that she did not like to put into words. -- Simone De Beauvoir
How will the fact of being women have affected our lives? What precise opportunities have been given us, and which ones have been denied? What destiny awaits our younger sisters, and in which direction should we point them? -- Simone De Beauvoir
Ce n'est gue' re que dans les asiles que les coquettes gardent avec ente tement une foi entie' re en des regards absents; normalement, elles re clament des te moins. Women fond of dress are hardly ever entirely satisfied not to be seen, except among the insane; usually they want witnesses. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Man may reproach women for their dissimulation, but his complacency must be great indeed for him to be so constantly duped. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Surviving one's own life, living on the other side of it like a spectator, is quite comfortable after all. You no longer expect anything, no longer fear anything, and every hour is like a memory. -- Simone De Beauvoir
To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody. -- Simone De Beauvoir
When you stubbornly give one man a chance, you arbitrarily deny it to another one. -- Simone De Beauvoir
She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Economically, men and women almost form two castes; all things being equal, the former have better jobs, higher wages, and greater chances to succeed than their new female competitors; they occupy many more places in industry, in politics, and so forth, and they hold the most important positions. -- Simone De Beauvoir
To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object. -- Simone De Beauvoir
No, we had nothing to blame ourselves for; it was just that we hadn't suffered enough. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Today I believe that, under the specially privileged conditions in which I exist, life contains two main truths which we must face simultaneously, and between which there is no choice - the joy of being, the horror of being no more. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise. (p. 248) -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
When he describes woman, each writer discloses his general ethics and the special idea he has of himself; and in her he often betrays also the gap between his world view and his egotistical dreams. -- Simone De Beauvoir
As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy ... It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present. -- Simone De Beauvoir
You have never had any confidence in him. And if he has no confidence in himself it is because he sees himself through your eyes. -- Simone De Beauvoir
I'm not against mothers. I am against the ideology which expects every woman to have children, and I'm against the circumstances under which mothers have to have their children. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The truth is, however, that when two individuals detest each other, while being unable to get along without each other, it is not of all human relations the truest and most moving, but rather the most pitiable. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it. -- Simone De Beauvoir
They use the pretext of avoiding war, to make you swallow any kind of peace, said Paul. They use the pretext of a revolution to involve us in any kind of war, said Jardinet. -- Simone De Beauvoir
History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born. -- Simone De Beauvoir
A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes. -- Simone De Beauvoir
I should like this sky, this quiet water, to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. -- Simone De Beauvoir
One of the problems he will seek to solve is how to make his wife both a servant and a companion; his attitude will evolve throughout the centuries, and this will also entail an evolution in woman's destiny.11 -- Simone De Beauvoir
What is an adult? A child blown up by age. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Vengeance is pointless, but certain men did not have a place in the world we sought to construct -- Simone De Beauvoir
We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The most scandalous aspect of any scandal is that one gets used to it. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Marriage is a career which brings about more benefits than many others. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The Communists , following Hegel , speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Trudging alone along that black road, sometimes in the teeth of wind and rain, and watching the white distant gleam of convolvulus through the park railings, gave me an exhilarating sensation of adventure. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another; it is never the given that confers superiorities: 'virtue', as the ancients called it, is defined on the level of 'that which depends on us'. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death. -- Simone De Beauvoir
One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one. -- Simone De Beauvoir
To identify Woman with Altruism is to guarantee man absolute rights to her devotion; it is to impose on women a categorical must-be. -- Simone De Beauvoir
I asked Isabelle whether she was happy. "I never ask myself, so I suppose the answer is yes." At all events she likes the moment of waking up. That seems to me a pretty good definition of happiness! It is the same with me: every morning, when I open my eyes, I smile. -- Simone De Beauvoir
If I were to share Jaques' existence I would find it hard to hold my own against him, for already I found his nihilism contagious. -- Simone De Beauvoir
If I were proud of anything in my life, it would be of our love. I feel we have to tell to each other as many things as we can, so we are not only lovers, but the closest of friends at the same time. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Has my watch stopped? No. But its hands do not seem to be going around. Don't look at them. Think of something else - anything else: think of yesterday, a calm, ordinary, easy-flowing day, in spite of the nervous tension of waiting. -- Simone De Beauvoir
(About Sartre ... )
His death does not separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are. It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long. -- Simone De Beauvoir
History took hold of me and never let me go thereafter. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The monologue is her form of revenge. FLAUBERT -- Simone De Beauvoir
I was too much of an extremist to be able to live under the eye of God and at the same time say both yes and no to life -- Simone De Beauvoir
She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Mystery is never more than a mirage that vanishes as we draw near to look at it. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men. -- Simone De Beauvoir
I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen ... -- Simone De Beauvoir
Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination. -- Simone De Beauvoir
As long as the family and the myth of the family ... have not been destroyed, women will still be oppressed. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Only man can be an enemy for man; only he can rob him of the meaning of his acts and his life because it also belongs only to him alone to confirm it in its existence, to recognize it in actual fact as a freedom -- Simone De Beauvoir
To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simpily an all-pervasive system. -- Simone De Beauvoir
One can never know oneself but only narrate oneself -- Simone De Beauvoir
To paint, to write, to engage in politics - these are not merely 'sublimations'; here we have aims that are willed for their own sakes. To deny it is to falsify all human history. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
To reject the notions of the eternal feminine, the black soul, or the Jewish character is not to deny that there are today Jews, blacks, or women: this denial is not a liberation for those concerned but an inauthentic flight. -- Simone De Beauvoir
If you haven't been happy very young, you can still be happy later on, but it's much harder. You need more luck. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
I could easily understand why Lambert was bored with this peace which gave us back our lives without giving us back our reasons for living. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Writing is a trade ... which is learned by writing. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning. -- Simone De Beauvoir
So not every female human being is necessarily a woman; she must take part in this mysterious and endangered reality known as femininity. Is femininity secreted by the ovaries? Is it enshrined in a Platonic heaven? -- Simone De Beauvoir
One can not start by saying our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends on us to give it importance. -- Simone De Beauvoir
: woman is an eminently poetic reality since man projects onto her everything he is not resolved to be. -- Simone De Beauvoir
I could not help but comment to my distinguished audience that every question asked about Sartre concerned his work, while all those asked about Beauvoir concerned her personal life. -- Simone De Beauvoir
I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way. -- Simone De Beauvoir
This privilege, which he alone possesses, of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects, is what he shares with all his fellow-men. In turn an object for others, he is nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which he depends. -- Simone De Beauvoir
However gifted an individual is at the outset, if his or her talents cannot be developed because of his or her social condition, because of the surrounding circumstances, these talents will be still-born. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects. pg. xxxiii -- Simone De Beauvoir
Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms. For each of them, love would be the revelation of the self through the gift of the self and the enrichment of the universe. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The Koran treats women with the most absolute contempt. -- Simone De Beauvoir
It is true that nothing is gained without something being lost: everyone knows that in fulfilling oneself one necessarily sacrifices some possibilities. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Patience is one of those feminine qualities which have their origin in our oppression but should be preserved after our liberation. -- Simone De Beauvoir
It is impossible to do anything for anyone. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Death itself does not frighten me; it is the jump I am afraid of. -- Simone De Beauvoir
When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[ ... ]. -- Simone De Beauvoir
I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short. -- Simone De Beauvoir
all success cloaks a surrender -- Simone De Beauvoir
All she had to do was make the simplest of gestures - open her hands and let go her hold. She lifted one hand and moved the fingers of it; they responded, in surprise and obedience, and this obedience of a thousand little unsuspected muscles was in itself a miracle. Why ask for more? -- Simone De Beauvoir
When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men. -- Simone De Beauvoir
It is a mistake to seek in fantasies the key to concrete behaviour; for fantasies are created and cherished as fantasies. The little girl who dreams of violation with mingled horror and acquiescence does not really wish to be violated and if such a thing should happen it would be a hateful calamity. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
There were no scruples, no feelings of respect or loyal affection that would stop us from making up our minds by the pure light of reason - and of our own desires. -- Simone De Beauvoir
But I know my only defense is to answer, "I think it because it is true," thereby eliminating my subjectivity; -- Simone De Beauvoir
Words have to murder reality before they can hold it captive ... -- Simone De Beauvoir
There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Have you ever felt in your inmost being, the conscience of others?' again she was trembling, the words were not releasing her. 'It's intolerable you know -- Simone De Beauvoir
One understands now the drama that rends the adolescent girl at puberty: she cannot become "a grown-up" without accepting her femininity -- Simone De Beauvoir
Christianity gave eroticism its savor of sin and legend when it endowed the human female with a soul. -- Simone De Beauvoir
All those minds that are interested in finding out the truth communicate with each other across the distances of space and time. I, too, was taking part in the effort which humanity makes to know. -- Simone De Beauvoir
One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Doomed to procreation and secondary tasks, stripped of her practical importance and her mystical prestige, woman becomes no more than a servant. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Between women love is contemplation; caresses are meant less to appropriate the other than to recreate oneself slowly through her; separation is eliminated, there is neither fight nor victory nor defeat; each one is both subject and object -- Simone De Beauvoir
From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity. -- Simone De Beauvoir
To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future. -- Simone De Beauvoir
They don't like being seen through: as for me I'm straight I don't join their act I tear masks off. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty ... Only a moral revolution
not a social or a political revolution
only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Old age is life's parody. -- Simone De Beauvoir
It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Simonides of Amorgos says, "Women are the greatest evil God ever created: if they sometimes seem useful, they soon change into trouble for their masters." For Hipponax: "There are but two days in life when your wife brings you joy: her wedding day and her funeral. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence. -- Simone De Beauvoir
If I want to define myself, I first have to say, "I am a woman"; all other assertions will arise from this basic truth. A man never begins by positing himself as an individual of a certain sex: that he is a man is obvious. -- Simone De Beauvoir
A man would never set out to write a book on the peculiar
situation of the human male. But if I wish to define myself, I
must first of all say: T am a woman -- Simone De Beauvoir
It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Writing ... is a profession that can only be learned by writing. -- Simone De Beauvoir
We will not let ourselves be intimidated by the number and violence of attacks against women; nor be fooled by the self-serving praise showered on the "real woman"; nor be won over by men's enthusiasm for her destiny, a destiny they would not for the world want to share. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word. Machines won't change human nature. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to. -- Simone De Beauvoir
At night I would climb the steps to the Sacre-Coeur, and I would watch Paris, that futile oasis, scintillating in the wilderness of space. I would weep, because it was so beautiful, and because it was so useless. -- Simone De Beauvoir
All the idols made by man, however terrifying they may be, are in point of fact subordinate to him, and that is why he will always have it in his power to destroy them. -- Simone De Beauvoir
I willingly trust myself to chance. I let my thoughts wander, I digress, not only sitting at my work, but all day long, all night even. It often happens that a sentence suddenly runs through my head before I go to bed, or when I am unable to sleep, and I get up again and write it down. -- Simone De Beauvoir
It is dreadful to think that behind me my own past is no longer anything but shifting darkness. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Society turns away from the aged worker as though he belonged to another species. That is why the whole question is buried in a conspiracy of silence. Old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization. -- Simone De Beauvoir
When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project -- Simone De Beauvoir
I was still keenly aware as in my childhood of the inexplicable nature of my presence here on earth; where had I come from here; where was I going? I often thought about these things with a kind of stupefied horror and used to fill my diary with long self-communings -- Simone De Beauvoir
When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The relation of woman to husband, of daughter to father, of sister to brother, is a relation of vassalage. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Which we welcomed precisely because it happened to suit our convenience. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Old age was growing inside me. It kept catching my eye from the depths of the mirror. I was paralyzed sometimes as I saw it making its way toward me so steadily when nothing inside me was ready for it. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The women of today are in a fair way to dethrone the myth of femininity; they are beginning to affirm their independence in concrete ways; but they do not easily succeed in living completely the life of a human being. -- Simone De Beauvoir
To give space when what one most yearns for is closeness, that is both the great test and great tragedy of love. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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 ... -- Simone De Beauvoir
He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies! -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death. -- Simone De Beauvoir
For years I thought my work still lay ahead, and now I find it is behind me: there was no moment when it took place. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority. -- Simone De Beauvoir
To adapt one's outlook to another person's salvation is the surest and quickest way of losing him. -- Simone De Beauvoir
If I were the earth it would disgust me, all this vermin on my back, I'd shake it off. -- Simone De Beauvoir
If I had rediscovered in Heaven, amplified to infinity, the monstrous alliance of fragility and implacability, of caprice and artificial necessity which had oppressed me since my birth, rather than worship Him I would have chosen damnation. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The facts of religion were convincing only to those who were already convinced. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Suddenly I was struck motionless: I was living through the first chapter of a novel in which I was the heroine; she was still almost a child, but we, too, were growing up. -- Simone De Beauvoir
There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation. -- Simone De Beauvoir
There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.'
There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me. -- Simone De Beauvoir
A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man. -- Simone De Beauvoir
I was very fond of Lagneau's phrase: I have no comfort but in my absolute despair. -- Simone De Beauvoir
But it is impossible for anyone to say 'I am sacrificing myself' without feeling bitterness. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Let women be provided with living strength of their own. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Biology alone cannot provide an answer to the question that concerns us: why is woman the Other? The question is how, in her, nature has been taken on in the course of history; the question is what humanity has made of the human female. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside
from others. We do not accept it willingly. -- Simone De Beauvoir
My overflowing leisure handed me the world and at the same time prevented me from seeing it. Just as the sun, filtering through the closed venetian blinds on a hot afternoon, makes the whole magnificence of summer blaze in my mind; whereas if I face its direct harsh glare it blinds me. -- Simone De Beauvoir
I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing. -- Simone De Beauvoir
I enjoyed my exhaustion, though; I liked overdoing things -- Simone De Beauvoir
To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The sin of smiling whilst Louise was weeping, the sin of shedding my own tears and not hers. The sin of being another being. -- Simone De Beauvoir
No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The individuals who seem to us most outstanding, who are honored with the name of genius, are those who have proposed to enact the fate of all humanity in their personal existences. -- Simone De Beauvoir
My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression. -- Simone De Beauvoir
If she could inherit, she would thus wrongly transmit her paternal family's riches to that of her husband: she is carefully excluded from the succession. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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 -- Simone De Beauvoir
... but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Resistance put up by the old capitalist paternalism prevents this equality from being concretely achieved: it will be achieved the day this resistance is broken down. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The body is the instrument of our hold on the world. -- Simone De Beauvoir
A woman's situation, i.e those meanings derived from the total context in which she comes to maturity, disposes her to apprehend her body not as instrument of her transcendence, but an object destined for another. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The fact is that a true human privilege is based upon the anatomical privilege only in virtue of the total situation. Psychoanalysis can establish its truths only in the historical context. -- Simone De Beauvoir
To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job. -- Simone De Beauvoir
It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
When Goya was 80 he drew an ancient man propped on two sticks, with a great mass of white hair and beard all over his face, and the inscription, "I am still learning." -- Simone De Beauvoir
Retirement revives the sorrow of parting, the feeling of abandonment, solitude and uselessness that is caused by the loss of some beloved person. -- Simone De Beauvoir
One of the benefits that oppression secures for the oppressor is that the humblest among them feels superior. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Taking without being taken in the anguish of becoming prey is the dangerous game of adolescent feminine sexuality. -- Simone De Beauvoir
It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Ah, if only there were two of me, she thought, one who spoke and the other who listened, one who lived and one who watched, how I would love myself! I would envy no one. -- Simone De Beauvoir
I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom. -- Simone De Beauvoir
All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception. -- Simone De Beauvoir
A foreign country can best be understood through its literature. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The human species is forever in a state of change, forever becoming. -- Simone De Beauvoir
One can hardly tell women that washing up saucepans is their divine mission, [so] they are told that bringing up children is their divine mission. But the way things are in the world, bringing up children has a great deal in common with washing up saucepans. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man. -- Simone De Beauvoir
She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal. -- Simone De Beauvoir
A man attaches himself to woman
not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The moment anyone begins making calculations or comparisons, they cease to live for the moment: the present becomes a mere pointer to the future, and all sorts of questions tend to arise. -- Simone De Beauvoir
To show your true ability is always, in a sense, to surpass the limits of your ability, to go a little beyond them: to dare, to seek, to invent; it is at such a moment that new talents are revealed, discovered, and realized -- Simone De Beauvoir
I had to call the past to life, and illuminate every corner of the five continents, descend to the centre of the earth and make the circuit of the moon and stars -- Simone De Beauvoir
The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them. -- Simone De Beauvoir
A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong. -- Simone De Beauvoir
But I was brought up on convent morals and paternal nationalism, I was getting bogged down in contradictions. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Live with no time-out. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
It is not the inferiority of women that has caused their historical insignificance; it is rather their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
I tried to love you less.I couldn't. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The innumerable conflicts that set men and women against one another come from the fact that neither is prepared to assume all the consequences of this situation which the one has offered and the other accepted. -- Simone De Beauvoir
If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through "the eternal feminine," and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman? -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
It must be added that the men who most respect embryonic life are the same ones who do not hesitate to send adults to death in war. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The passionate man seeks possession; he seeks to attain being. The failure and the hell which he creates for himself have been described often enough. He causes certain rare treasures to appear in the world, but he also -- Simone De Beauvoir
Literature took the place in my life that had once been occupied by religion: it absorbed me entirely, and transfigured my life. -- Simone De Beauvoir
It is so tiring to hate someone you love. -- Simone De Beauvoir
; the man who does not "understand" a woman is happy to replace his subjective deficiency with an objective resistance; instead of admitting his ignorance, he recognizes the presence of a mystery exterior to himself: here is an excuse that flatters his laziness and vanity at the same time. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Why shouldn't a mystical theology be possible? 'I want to touch God or become God,' I declared in my journal. All through that year I abandoned myself intermittently to these deliriums. -- Simone De Beauvoir
If you point out that they're walking in shit they scream it's you that have dirty feet. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The feminine body is expected to be flesh, but discreetly so; -- Simone De Beauvoir
Modern woman is everywhere permitted to regard her body as capital for exploitation. -- Simone De Beauvoir
It is for man to establish the reign of liberty in the midst of the world of the given. To gain the supreme victory, it is necessary, for one thing, that by and through their natural differentiation men and women unequivocally affirm their brotherhood. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Saint Thomas declared that woman was an "inessential" being, which, from a masculine point of view, is a way of positing the accidental character of sexuality. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels. -- Simone De Beauvoir
A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity. -- Simone De Beauvoir
But an action which wants to serve man ought to be careful not to forget him on the way, if it chooses to fulfill itself blindly, it will lose its meaning or will take on an unforeseen meaning; for the goal is not fixed once & for all; it is defined all along the road which leads up to it. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
I've done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I've been swindled all the same because it's never anything more. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Women's mutual understanding comes from the fact that they identify themselves with each other; but for the same reason each is against the others. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Humans are the beings whose essence is in not having an essence -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
We belong to this earth. Now I can see the truth ... I love you on this earth of ours. Love me, do! -- Simone De Beauvoir
In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it. -- Simone De Beauvoir
There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction ... -- Simone De Beauvoir
For the first time I saw her as a dead body under suspended sentence. -- Simone De Beauvoir
I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe. -- Simone De Beauvoir
That a whole part of the middle class detests me ... is utterly normal. I would be troubled if the contrary were true. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, I don't want to be just another blade of grass. -- Simone De Beauvoir
There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Cooking is revolution and creation ... -- Simone De Beauvoir
But the answer is obvious: it is easy to believe one is sovereign when alone, to believe oneself strong when carefully refusing to bear any burden. -- Simone De Beauvoir
If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it a discussion -- Simone De Beauvoir
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me. -- Simone De Beauvoir
In order to be an artist, one must be deeply rooted in the society. -- Simone De Beauvoir
But women do not say 'We', except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say 'women', and women use the same word in referring to themselves. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The prostitute is the sum of all types of feminine slavery at once. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours ... -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Art is an attempt to integrate evil. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Girls are weighed down by restrictions, boys with demands - two equally harmful disciplines. -- Simone De Beauvoir
It is doubtless impossible to approach any human problems with a mind free from bias. -- Simone De Beauvoir
If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat. -- Simone De Beauvoir
One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly. -- Simone De Beauvoir
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. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Psychoanalysts in particular define man as a human being and woman as a female: every time she acts like a human being, the woman is said to be imitating the male. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Jealousy is not contemptible, real love has a beak and claws. -- Simone De Beauvoir
But this element of failure is a very condition of his life; one can never dream of eliminating it without immediately dreaming of death. This does not mean that one should consent to failure, but rather one must consent to struggle against it without respite. -- Simone De Beauvoir
People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls. -- Simone De Beauvoir
There is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Charity is all very nice,but people want to get something out of it.That's the principle of charity affairs. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Oh, it was easy to be a soldier, it was much less easy to become a man again. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The arrogance of some Christians would close heaven to them if, to their misfortune, it existed. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Habit has a kind of poetry. -- Simone De Beauvoir
I was convinced that I would be, that I was already, one in a million. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Marriage is traditionally the destiny offered to women by society. Most women are married or have been, or plan to be or suffer from not being. -- Simone De Beauvoir
On the contrary, shared destitution makes the conjugal link reciprocal. -- Simone De Beauvoir
I would have to have a bit of heroism and get out of myself. But I love myself so much! -- Simone De Beauvoir
Buying is profound pleasure. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The Social Security's medical consultants support the interest not of the victims but of the organization. -- Simone De Beauvoir
It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living. -- Simone De Beauvoir
It's only arrogance if you're wrong. -- Simone De Beauvoir
You said something very true the other day: that for us, nudity begins with the face. -- Simone De Beauvoir
To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself - exactly oneself and no one else - and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Anyway I know only too well that all life is nothing but a brief reprieve from death. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay. -- Simone De Beauvoir
The American woman's inequality with men is proved by her defiant attitude. -- Simone De Beauvoir
It is so difficult not to become vain about one's own good luck. -- Simone De Beauvoir
This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate. -- Simone De Beauvoir
To be moral is to discover fundamentally ones own being. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Immortality is a terrible curse. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consultation for death. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male. -- Simone De Beauvoir
What would Prince Charming have for occupation if he had not to awaken the Sleeping beauty? -- Simone De Beauvoir
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Justice can never be done in the midst of injustice. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Harmony between two individuals is never granted-it has to be conquered indefinitely. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself. -- Simone De Beauvoir
As we talked in the half-darkness I assuaged an old unhappiness. -- Simone De Beauvoir
It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them. -- Simone De Beauvoir
To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity. -- Simone De Beauvoir
It must feel wonderfully strange when, like Manette, one stands there, the only witness to a vanished world. -- Simone De Beauvoir
In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider ... -- Simone De Beauvoir
Christian ideology has contributed no little to the oppression of woman. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me -- Simone De Beauvoir
It is easier to put people in chains than to remove them if the chains bring prestige, said George Bernard Shaw. -- Simone De Beauvoir
That the child is the supreme aim of woman is a statement having precisely the value of an advertising slogan. -- Simone De Beauvoir
Buying is a profound pleasure. -- Simone De Beauvoir