Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

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.

...faith draws its fanatical power from the fact that it is not knowledge: it is blind, passionate, stubborn, and stupid; what it puts forward is done unconditionally, against reason, against history, against all refutation.

When one has lived so much for others it is quite hard to turn oneself back again — to live for oneself.

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.

Yes, I would, if they are the kind that shakes.

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. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.

It was said that I refused to grant any value to the maternal instinct and to love. This was not so. I simply asked that women should experience them truthfully and freely, whereas they often use them as excuses and take refuge in them, only to find themselves imprisoned in that refuge when those emotions have dried up in their hearts. I was accused of preaching sexual promiscuity; but at no point did I ever advise anyone to sleep with just anyone at just any time; my opinion on this subject is that all choices, agreements and refusals should be made independently of institutions, conventions and motives of self-aggrandizement; if the reasons for it are not of the same order as the act itself, then the only result can be lies, distortions and mutilations.

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

Man may reproach women for their dissimulation, but his complacency must be great indeed for him to be so constantly duped.

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.

To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.

Today it strikes me that the most important aspect of these conversations was not so much what we said as what we took for granted, and what in fact was not so at all. We were wrong about almost everything. An accurate character sketch must take these errors into account, since they expressed one kind of reality - our actual situation.

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

Toute oppression crée un état de guerre. Ce cas-ci ne fait pas exception. L'existant que l'on considère comme inessentiel ne peut manquer de prétendre rétablir sa souveraineté. Aujourd'hui, le combat prend une autre figure; au lieu de vouloir enfermer l'homme dans un cachot, la femme essaie de s'en évader; elle ne cherche plus à l'entraîner dans les régions de l'immanence mais à émerger dans la lumière de la transcendance.

He walks in the street, a picture of modesty in his felt hat and his gabardine suit, and all the while he's thinking, "I'm immortal." The world is his, time is his, and I'm nothing but an insect.