Simone de Beauvoir Quotes:

Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.

source: - Alice Schwarzer, Simone de Beauvoir (1984). “Simone De Beauvoir Today”, Not Avail

Topics: Change, Positive, Inspirational Life, Gamble

One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1975). “The Coming of Age”

Topics: Love, Life, Kindness, Indignation, Moral Indignation

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

Topics: Life And Love, Intelligent, Able, Resourceful

She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.

Topics: Love, Romantic, Space

All oppression creates a state of war.

Topics: War, Historical, Oppression, Oppressors, Political Oppression

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.

Topics: Infinity, Accepting, Conceiving

If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.

Topics: War, Long, Victory, Victory Defeat

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.

Topics: Life, Positive, Reason

Marriage is a career which brings about more benefits than many others.

Topics: Marriage, Careers, Benefits, Lasting Marriage

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.

source: - "Le sang des autres (The Blood of Others)". Book by Simone de Beauvoir, 1945.

Topics: Inspirational, Freedom, 4th Of July, Love Freedom, Independence And Freedom

The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.

Topics: Women, Equality, Males, Demigods

There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.

Topics: Travel, New York, Sleep, I Love New York, Old New York

The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength -each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence.

Topics: Dream, Children, War, Deceptive, Plenitude

What is an adult? A child blown up by age.

Topics: Birthday, Time, Children, Adulthood

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.

source: - "All Said and Done". Book by Simone de Beauvoir, 1972.

Topics: Inspirational, Truth, Comfort, Whole Truth, Bitter Truth

Buying is a profound pleasure.

Topics: Shopping, Profound, Buying

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.

Topics: Eye, No Confidence

No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

Topics: Men, Arrogant, Aggressive

Be loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody.

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[...].

Topics: Children, Book, Despair

If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it "a discussion

Topics: Issues, Arrogance, Males

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 ...

Topics: Aging, Strange, Ends

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.

Topics: Eye, Mirrors, Age, Paralyzed

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.

Topics: Life, Death, Sex

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.

Topics: Mind, Way, Granted, Took For Granted

Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.

Topics: Library, Adrift, Literature

Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.

Topics: Fighting, Self, Guarantees

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.

Topics: Mean, Winning, Men

One can not start by saying our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends on us to give it importance.

Topics: Destiny, Giving, Importance

In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.

Topics: Suicide, Hate, Reality, Denying Yourself

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.

Topics: Individuality, Talent, Social, Social Conditions

No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.

Topics: Existential, Existence, Fulfilled

The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another.

Topics: Helping Others, People, Humanity

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.

Topics: Taken, Home, House

I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.

Topics: Talking, Judgment, Too Short, Judgment Day

That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.

Topics: Inspirational, Insperational, Giving, Kindness Generosity, Give It Your All

Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive.

Topics: Philosophy, Real, Ignorance, Certitude, Collectivity

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.

Topics: Children, Men, Firsts

Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other.

Topics: Effort

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.

Topics: Morning, Princess, Lovely, Morning Glory, Wisteria

A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

Topics: Men, Enjoy

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?

Topics: Couple, Together, Goes On

Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.

Topics: Men, Law, Light

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)

Topics: Adventure, Two, Risk, Face To Face

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.

Topics: Unique, Convince, Oneself

To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other...when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.

Topics: Couple, Independent, Men

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!

Topics: Lying, Kids, People

all success cloaks a surrender

Topics: Surrender, Cloaks

‎A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.

Topics: Writing, Taste, Ashes

...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.

Topics: Queens, Men, Slave

I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.

Topics: Way, Planets, Made

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.

Topics: Men, Feminist, Use

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.

source: - Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.102, Open Road Media

Topics: Able, You Like It, Given

The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams.

Topics: Dream, Women, Motherhood, Hands And Feet

What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.

Topics: Important, Odd Things, Diaries

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 the absolute truth.

Topics: Inspiring, Men, Views

Each of us is responsible for everything and to every human being.

Topics: Responsible, Humans

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.

Topics: Children, Home, Choices, Stay At Home

Art is an attempt to integrate evil.

Topics: Art, Evil, Integrating

The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project

Topics: Body, World, Projects

This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.

Topics: Philosophy, Men, World

The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.

Topics: Powerful, Writing, Bad Ass, Scandalous

When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.

Topics: Couple, Justice, Hypocrisy

People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls.

Topics: Thinking, People, Balls

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.

Topics: Truth, Guilt, Doe

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.

Topics: Giving, Age, Goes On, Former Life

She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust.

Topics: Fall, Dust, One Day

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.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1963). “Nature of the second sex”

Topics: Inspiring, Men, Males

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.

Topics: Sex, Women, Mean, Words Love

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

Topics: Age, Born, Male Privilege, Female Empowerment, Inspirational Strong Women

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.

Topics: Tasks, Cleaning, Made, Marking Time, Chores

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.

Topics: Life, Inspire, Dying, Perpetuating, Surpassing

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.

Topics: Adventure, Want, Infinity

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.

Topics: Atheist, Thinking, World

There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.

Topics: Conscience

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.

Topics: Sex, Broken, Magic, Magic Words

Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.

Topics: Hard Times, Today, Existentialism, Outwitting, Having A Hard Time

Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.

Topics: Capability

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.

Topics: Men, Long, Philosopher

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.

Topics: Memories, Waiting, Racing, Sun Set

When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.

Topics: Men, Justice, Diversity

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.

Topics: Men, Hands, World

You have to start from where you are today and from what can be done.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Done, Today, Where You Are

As long as the family and the myth of the family ... have not been destroyed, women will still be oppressed.

Topics: Long, Myth, Stills

Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.

Topics: Self, Stories, Consciousness

Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

Topics: Men, Inferiority, Males

Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (2011). “The Ethics of Ambiguity”, p.47, Open Road Media

Topics: Trying, Oppression, Utility, Meaning Nothing

It's only arrogance if you're wrong.

Topics: Arrogance, Ifs

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

Topics: Discovery, Achievement, Littles, New Talent

Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity. The evil all arose from the fact that he had increased his needs rather than limited them; . . . As long as fresh needs continued to be created, so new frustrations would come into being. When had the decline begun? The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution - not a social or political revolution - only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1968). “Les Belles Images”

Topics: Country, Loss, Frustration, Political Revolution

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.

Topics: Two, Self, Would Be, Enrichment, Reciprocal

To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

Topics: Funny, Art, Jobs, Husband To Be, Your Husband

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.

Topics: Gay, Men, Heterosexuality Is, Lgbt Pride, Gay Pride

Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

Topics: Beautiful, Witch, Has Beens

Words have to murder reality before they can hold it captive.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1965). “The prime of life”

Topics: Reality, Murder, Captives

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.

Topics: War, Men, Adults

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.

source: - "The Coming of Age". Book by Simone de Beauvoir. Conclusion, p. 543, 1970.

Topics: Anxiety, Age, Care, Social Life

I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.

Topics: Selfish, Work, Loneliness

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.

source: - Alice Schwarzer, Simone de Beauvoir (1984). “Simone De Beauvoir Today”, Not Avail

Topics: Children, Women, World

I don't want to be just another blade of grass.

source: - "All Men are Mortal". Book by Simone de Beauvoir, 1946.

Topics: Want, Blades, Grass

To give space when what one most yearns for is closeness, that is both the great test and great tragedy of love.

Topics: Space, Giving, Tragedy, Closeness, Great Tragedy

Between women love is contemplative; caresses are intended less to gain possession of the other than gradually to re-create the self through her; separateness is abolished, there is no struggle, no victory, no defeat; in exact reciprocity each is at once subject and object, sovereign and slave; duality become mutuality.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

Topics: Struggle, Love Is, Self, Reciprocity

Harmony between two individuals is never granted-it has to be conquered indefinitely.

Topics: Two, Harmony, Granted

From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.

source: - Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.62, Open Road Media

Topics: Philosophy, Existentialism, Ambiguity

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.

Topics: Men, Weakness, Danger

To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1965). “The prime of life”

Topics: Attitude, Political

Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

Topics: Heaven, Earth, Philosopher

The emancipation of women must be the work of women themselves, independent of the class struggle.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Struggle, Independent, Class

We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible.

source: - Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.95, Open Road Media

Topics: Past, Action, Regard

As soon as a woman re- fuses to be perfectly happy doing housework eight hours a day, society has a tendency to want to do a lobotomy on her.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Eight, Want, Lobotomy

Live with no time-out.

Topics: Inspirational, Time, Inspiration

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.

Topics: Wings, Justice, Diversity, Boudoir

Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.

Topics: Inspirational, Society, Care

The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one.

Topics: Retirement, Roles, Retired

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.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

Topics: Women, Independence, Today

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.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Believe, Men, Self

Writing ... is a profession that can only be learned by writing.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1965). “The prime of life”

Topics: Writing, Profession

To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

Topics: Women, Defects, Ifs

it is true that nothing is gained without something being lost: everyone knows that in fulfilling oneself one necessarily sacrifices some possibilities.

Topics: Sacrifice, Possibility, Lost

To be feminist doesn't mean simply to do nothing, to reduce yourself to total impotence under the pretext of refusing masculine values. There is a problematic, a very difficult dialectic between accepting power and refusing it, accepting certain masculine values, and wanting to transform them. I think it's worth a try.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Mean, Thinking, Feminist

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.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1972). “La vieillesse”

Topics: Civilization, Silence, Age

A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: 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; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1948). “The Ethics of Ambiguity”

Topics: Able, Limits, Recognition

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.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1969). “The Woman Destroyed”, HarperCollins Publishers

Topics: Fire, Vigor, Lost Everything

I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret A. Simons, Marybeth Timmermann, Mary Beth Mader (2004). “Philosophical Writings”, p.130, University of Illinois Press

Topics: World, Shapes, Firsts

Most feminists in France came to feminism after '68 as a result of the hypocrisy they experienced in leftist movements. In these movements, where everyone believed there was going to be true equality, fraternity between men and women, and that together they were going to struggle against this rotten society, even there they noticed that the leftists, the militants, kept them "in their place." Women made the coffee while the others did the talking; they were the ones who typed the letters.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Coffee, Struggle, Men, Leftists, True Equality

Justice can never be done in the midst of injustice.

Topics: Justice, Done, Injustice

Jealousy is not contemptible, real love has a beak and claws.

source: - Simone De Beauvoir (2013). “The Woman Destroyed”, p.83, Pantheon

Topics: Real, Real Love, Beaks

The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1963). “Nature of the second sex”

Topics: Men, Sympathetic, Situation

Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1969). “The Woman Destroyed”, HarperCollins Publishers

Topics: Given, Has Beens

I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, 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. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where i slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (2011). “The Ethics of Ambiguity”, p.6, Open Road Media

Topics: Distance, Thinking, Sky

Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1977). “Force of Circumstance: Hard times”

Topics: Heart, Teeth, Tonight

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.

Topics: Fall, Thinking, Heaven

A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

Topics: Men

Old age is life's parody.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1972). “La vieillesse”

Topics: Age, Parody, Old Age

In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1965). “The prime of life”

Topics: Artist, Outsiders, Remains

It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency.

Topics: Contentment, Complacency, Steps

Every time I start on a new book, I am a beginner again. I doubt myself, I grow discouraged, all the work accomplished in the past is as though it never was, my first drafts are so shapeless that it seems impossible to go on with the attempt at all, right up until the moment - always imperceptible, there, too, there is a break - when it is has become impossible not to finish it.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1977). “Force of Circumstance: Hard times”

Topics: Book, Past, Doubt, New Books

It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

Topics: Anxiety, Body, Being A Woman

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.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1968). “Les Belles Images”

Topics: Running, Doe, Problem

Christian ideology has contributed no little to the oppression of woman.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1963). “Nature of the second sex”

Topics: Christian, Littles, Oppression

Habit has a kind of poetry.

Topics: Kind, Habit

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."

source: - "All Men are Mortal". Book by Simone de Beauvoir, p. 28, 1946.

Topics: Men, Thinking, One Day

At the moment of their emancipation, women have a need to write their own histories.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Writing, Needs, Moments

What would Prince Charming have for occupation if he had not to awaken the Sleeping beauty?

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

Topics: Sleep, Occupation, Charming, Sleeping Beauty

Only a woman can write what it is to feel as a woman, to be a woman.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Writing, Feels

Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (2016). “Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter”, p.34, HarperCollins

Topics: Revenge, Reality, Fiction

Each person has his or her own very particular history and after all, the unconscious is the most secret part of ourselves.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Secret, Unconscious, Persons

One can not start by saying that our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends upon us to give it importance.

source: - "The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Emotions".

Topics: Destiny, Giving, Importance

Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

Topics: Imagination, Political, Doe, Figments

…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.

Topics: Thinking, Long, Training, Polite Conversation

I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1977). “Force of circumstance”

Topics: God, Literature, Sacred

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.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

Topics: Sex, Two, Female, Hegel

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.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1968). “Les Belles Images”

Topics: Suicide, Heart, Bars

I could see no reason for being sad. It´s just that it makes me unhappy not to feel happy.

Topics: Being Sad, Unhappy, Reason

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.

Topics: Sex, Real, Perfectly Natural, Indignant

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.

source: - Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.134, Open Road Media

Topics: Men, Doe, Addresses, Evasion

One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

Topics: Genius, Becoming, Impossible

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?

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1963). “Nature of the second sex”

Topics: Female, Faces, Eternity

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.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Country, Progress, Saws, Social Progress

I admire Freud a great deal as a person and thinker. Despite everything, I find his work very, very rich, but I think that for women he has been absolutely disastrous. And even more so, everyone who came after him.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Thinking, Rich, Admire

Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1948). “The Ethics of Ambiguity”

Topics: Doe, Want, Existence

If you are truly on the left, if you reject ideas of power and hierarchy, what you want is equality. Otherwise, it won't work at all.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Ideas, Want, Hierarchy

Let women be provided with living strength of their own. Let them have the means to attack the world and wrest from it their own subsistence, and their dependence will be abolished -- that of man also.

Topics: Mean, Men, World

Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (2011). “The Ethics of Ambiguity”, p.39, Open Road Media

Topics: Discovery, Accomplishment, Mind

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."

Topics: Men, Hair, Two, Goya, White Hair

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.

source: - Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.99, Open Road Media

Topics: Doe, Existential, Slave

I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.

Topics: Atheist, Believe, Positive Atheism

Patience is one of those feminine qualities which have their origin in our oppression but should be preserved after our liberation.

Topics: Quality, Oppression, Feminine

The individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of himself.

source: - Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.133, Open Road Media

Topics: Spring, Heart, Movement, Transcending

I like everyone who tries to show that madness is, in large part, conditioned by society and particularly by the family, and therefore, strongly affects women.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Trying, Madness, Shows

The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change.

Topics: Boxes, Ballots, Mechanism

The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.

Topics: World, Return, No Hope

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.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1972). “La vieillesse”

Topics: Time, Age, Aging

The renewed use of lobotomy today is particularly applicable to women: Because they do routine things, it is possible to take away their spirit of revolt, of debate, of criticism, and still leave them perfectly capable of making stews or washing dishes. It's terrible, this tendency to consider women something dangerous to society.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Criticism, Routine, Use, Washing Dishes, Stew

There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

Topics: Expansion, Existence, Justification

To be moral is to discover fundamentally ones own being.

Topics: Moral

‎A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.

Topics: Writing, Ashes, Taste

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.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Men, Virginia, Creating, Woolf

There is the problem of unpaid labor, such as housework, which represents millions and millions of unsalaried work hours and on which masculine society is firmly based. To put an end to this would be to send the present-day capitalist system flying in a single blow. Only we can't do it by ourselves; there have to be other kinds of attacks on the system. So a certain alliance with revolutionary systems is necessary, even masculine ones.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Blow, Flying, Would Be

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.

source: - Alice Schwarzer, Simone de Beauvoir (1984). “Simone De Beauvoir Today”, Not Avail

Topics: Mother, Children, Circumstances

One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.

Topics: Turns

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.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

Topics: Men, Facts, Assuming

In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.

source: - Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.71, Open Road Media

Topics: Stupid, Overcoming, Stubborn

This is certainly a very tricky point: How to ally yourself to other leftist forces without losing your feminist specificity.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Feminist, Allies, Losing, Specificity

The human species is forever in a state of change, forever becoming.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1963). “Nature of the second sex”

Topics: Forever, Becoming, States

When an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior.

source: - "Nature of the second sex".

Topics: Feminism, Doe, Inferiority

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.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

Topics: Change, Past, Tears, Perpetuating

It is doubtless impossible to approach any human problems with a mind free from bias.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

Topics: Mind, Impossible, Problem, Mind Free, Human Problems

There is something false in this search for a purely feminine writing style. Language, such as it is, is inherited from a masculine society, and it contains many male prejudices. We must rid language of all that. Still, a language is not something created artificially; the proletariat can't use a different language from the bourgeoisie, even if they use it differently, even if from time to time they invent something, technical words or even a kind of worker's slang, which can be very beautiful and very rich. Women can do that as well, enrich their language, clean it up.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Beautiful, Writing, Style, Slang, Writing Style

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.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “America Day by Day”

Topics: Luck, United States, Would Be

If women really did have complete equality with men, society would be completely overturned.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Men, Would Be, Ifs

If the unconscious must express itself it will do so through the work that you do consciously or subconsciously, with words, with what you have to say.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Unconscious, Ifs

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.

Topics: Time, Decay, Problem

I would certainly like to see some young women take up psychoanalysis seriously and reconstruct it from an absolutely new viewpoint.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Viewpoints, Young, Young Women

Christianity gave eroticism its savor of sin and legend when it endowed the human female with a soul.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

Topics: Soul, Atheism, Female

A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.

source: - Simone de Beauvoir (1965). “The prime of life”

Topics: Country, Literature, Understood

There are topics which are common to men and women. I think that if a woman speaks of oppression, of misery, she will speak of it in exactly the same way as a man. But if she speaks of her own personal problems as a woman, she will obviously speak in another way.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Men, Thinking, Way, Personal Problems

Can one say that there is a way of crying out, of speaking, which is properly feminine? Personally, I don't think so. In the end, I find this is another way of putting women in a kind of singularity, a ghetto, which is not what I want. I want them to be singular and universal at the same time.

source: - Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Topics: Ghetto, Thinking, Want

Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.

source: - Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.106, Open Road Media

Topics: War, Sacrifice, Generations, Collectivity

All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn´t come fast enough. Instead of being open, you´re closed up tight. That´s the worst sin of all - the sin of omission.

Topics: Inspiration, Opportunity, Ideas