Simone De Beauvoir

Quotes

• “But presently I began to bubble with happiness. No, my daughters' absence did not sadden me at all-quite the reverse. I ...”
• “I read it (Beauvoir's autobiography), but again it was a whole other life. Part of my life or what I've been interested ...”
• “(Who are some of the writers you enjoy reading and re-reading?) SK: Dostoevsky and Simone De Beauvoir. Since I was a you...”
• “The Second Sex remains the most cogent and thorough book of feminist theory yet written. With its exhaustive portrayal o...”
• “Toute oppression crée un état de guerre. Ce cas-ci ne fait pas exception. L'existant que l'on considère comme inessentie...”
• “All agree in recognising the fact that females exist in the human species; today as always they make up about one half o...”
• “Reading The Second Sex in the 1950s isolation of an academic housewife had felt less dangerous than reading "The Myth of...”
• “All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception. The existent who is regarded as inessential cannot fail...”
• “Even the children of Carmona were divided into two camps, and below the ramparts, among the brushwood and rocks, we batt...”
• “To be gazed at is one danger; to be manhandled is another. Women as a rule are unfamiliar with violence, they have not b...”
• “In horror, in terror, she accepted the metamorphosis - gnat, foam, ant, until death. And it's only the beginning, she th...”
• “(about Lorraine Hansberry) In 1957, she had begun the draft of an essay on Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in which ...”
• “[T]he Sahara was a spectacle as alive as the sea. The tints of the dunes changed according to the time of day and the an...”
• “The theoretical and philosophical contribution of Simone de Beauvoir, writing in the 1940s in a context of general polit...”
• “Simone de Beauvoir said penetratingly of De Sade's work that 'he is trying to communicate an experience whose distinguis...”
• “I wasn't that interested in her, except for Une mort très douce [A death most sweet], about her mother's death. But the ...”
• “We must not believe, certainly, that a change in woman's economic condition alone is enough to transform her, though thi...”
• “You made me come to Paris. You pestered me to start living again. Well, now it's up to you to make my life livable. You ...”
• “Work almost always has a double aspect: it is a bondage, a wearisome drudgery; but it is also a source of interest, a st...”
• “For the first time in my life, I took part in a real battle between men. The dead did not come to life again, the vanqui...”
• “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should n...”
• “There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the w...”
• “Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of l...”
• “Il n'y a pas de mort naturelle: rien de ce qui arrive à l'homme n'est jamais naturel puisque sa présence met le monde en...”
• “She was beautiful, with a beauty so severe and so solitary that at first it was startling. "Ah! If only there were two o...”
• “It is for man to establish the reign of liberty in the midst of the world of the given. To gain the supreme victory, it ...”
• “Were we really more advanced than the alchemists of Carmona? We had brought to light certain facts that they were not aw...”
• “What did today's sacrifices matter: the Universe lay ahead in the future. What did burnings at the stake and massacres m...”
• “I was rereading your autobiography. You are a great charmer and this is due to your sincerity. It is a rare quality to c...”
• “It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms...”
• “On her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, as quoted in "Did Simone de Beauvoir's open 'marriage' make her happy?" by Li...”
• “He had not applauded, he had remained seated, but he had looked at her steadily. From the depths of eternity he had look...”
• “Woman is an existent who is called upon to make herself object; as subject she has an aggressive element in her sensuali...”
• “Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter ...”
• “France, where a number of prominent women, including Simone de Beauvoir (Ellen Willis's heroine as well as Shulamith Fir...”
• “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...”
• “In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man...”
• “We were two of a kind, and our relationship would endure as long as we did: but it could not make up entirely for the fl...”
• “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 ...”
• “Marie Vieux-Chauvet, 1969 letter. Translated from the French in "The Letters of Marie Chauvet and Simone de Beauvoir: A ...”
• “Cooking is revelation and creation; and a woman can find special satisfaction in a successful cake or a flaky pastry, fo...”
• “Sex pleasure in woman, as I have said, is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppo...”
• “Simone de Beauvoir once said: "It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our stren...”
• “A Dialogue with Simone de Beauvoir," in Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement, (New York: ...”
• “I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my l...”
• “One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming ...”
• “It was as though some stubborn god spent their time in an immutable and absurd balancing act between life and death, pro...”
• “Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov; this was used as an epigraph in The Blood of Others, and is sometimes attri...”
• “The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking t...”
• “One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation an...”