Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

A menudo curar es mutilar.

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

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.

I cannot withdraw into myself. I exist, outside myself and everywhere in the world. There is not an inch of my path which does not encroach on the path of another: there is no way of being that can prevent me from overflowing myself at every moment. This life that I weave with my own substance, it offers other men a thousand unknown faces, it crosses impetuously their fate.

I was no longer a vacant mind, an abstracted gaze, but the turbulent fragrance of the waving grain, the intimate smell of the heather moors, the dense heat of noon or the shiver of twilight; I was heavy; yet I was as vapour in the blue airs of summer and knew no bounds.

If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression.

I quickly realized that friendships without tomorrows, and the little anguishes of parting, were part of the pleasures of traveling. I resolutely avoided bores, saw only those who amused me. We spent afternoons taking long walks, nights drinking and talking, and then we would leave each other, never to meet again, and there were no regrets. How simple life was. No regrets, no obligations, my acts and gestures counted for nothing, no one asked my advice, and I knew no other rule but my whims.

By the time humankind reaches the stage of writing its mythology and laws, patriarchy is definitively established: it is males who write the codes.

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

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...

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

Work almost always has a double aspect: it is a bondage, a wearisome drudgery; but it is also a source of interest, a steadying element, a factor that helps to integrate the worker with society. Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.

Girls are weighed down by restrictions, boys with demands - two equally harmful disciplines.

All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception. The existent who is regarded as inessential cannot fail to demand the re-establishment of her sovereignty. Today the combat takes a different shape; instead of wishing to put man in a prison, woman endeavours to escape from one; she no longer seeks to drag him into the realms of immanence but to emerge, herself, into the light of transcendence.

Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity.