Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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 is dreadful to think that behind me my own past is no longer anything but shifting darkness.

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.

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 no to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

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.

في الريف كنت أحس هناك وجود الله أكثر مما كنت أحسه في باريس. و كنت كلما التصقت بالأرض كلماازددت قرباً منه، و كانت كل نزهة صلاة له. كان يخيل إلي أنه على نحو ما بحاجة إلى عينيّ لتكون للأشجار ألوانها. و حرارة الشمس، و رطوبةالندى، أنى لذهن مجرد أن يحسهما إلا عبر جسدي؟ لقد جعل هذه الأرض للبشر، و جعل البشر ليشهدوا بمحاسنها. و حين كنت أجتاز في الصباح الحواجز لأوغل في الغابات فإنما هو الذي كان يناديني، و كان ينظر إلي بفرح و أنا أنظر إلى هذا العالم الذي خلقه لأراه.

That the child is the supreme aim of woman is a statement having precisely the value of an advertising slogan.

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

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

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

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.