Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

You can't address yourself to women by speaking a language which no average woman will understand. In my opinion, it's wrong.

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

--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.

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

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

I am not at all for a feminism which is entirely separatist, which would say, "this domain is purely for women." I don't believe that at all.

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.

There are so many problems. Women can go to work on these as well without giving up their feminism.

There is a kind of universality in the human condition, masculine or feminine. That's one thing I continue to believe.

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.

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.

History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.

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

Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.

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.

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.

All oppression creates a state of war.

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.

That a whole part of the middle class detests me... is utterly normal. I would be troubled if the contrary were true.

It's so easy to be mistaken about the future. Sometimes there are avant-gardes which believe themselves to be the avant-garde and which later find themselves to be absolutely dated.

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.

The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.

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.

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

On the evenings when my parents held parties, the drawing-room mirrors multiplied to infinity the scintillations of a crystal chandelier. Mama would take her seat at the grand piano to accompany a lady dressed in a cloud of tulle who played the violin and a cousin who performed on a cello. I would crack between my teeth the candied shell of an artificial fruit, and a burst of light would illuminate my palate with a taste of blackcurrant or pineapple: all the colours, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held the whole party in my mouth.

I think it's wrong to write in a totally esoteric language when you want to talk about things which interest a multitude of women.

A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.

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

She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life.

To be moral is to discover fundamentally ones own being.

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

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

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.

But I must admit I didn´t like that idea; do the same thing as everyone else. Eating to live, living to eat - that had been the nightmare of my adolescence. If it meant going back to that, if would be just as well to turn on the gas at once. But I suppose everyone thinks of things like that: let´s turn on the gas at once. And you don´t turn it on.

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.

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.

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.

I have never read a really good novel written by a man where women are portrayed as they truly are. They can be portrayed externally very well - Stendhal's Madame de Renal, for example - but only as seen from the outside.

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.

A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.

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.

from one minute to the next the present is merely an honorary past. It must be filled unceasingly anew to dissemble the curse it carries within itself; that is why Americans like speed, alcohol, thriller films and any sensational news: the demand for new things, and ever newer things, is feverish since nowhere will they rest.

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

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

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?

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

In order to be an artist, one must be deeply rooted in the society.

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