Simone de Beauvoir Quotes - Page 10

There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

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.

She was trying to get rid of a religious hangover.

A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.

He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!

If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it "a discussion

Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise." (p. 248)

I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.

To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.

Anyway I know only too well that all life is nothing but a brief reprieve from death.

You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do or don't do.

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

Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.

it is not the inferiority of women that has caused their historical insignificance; it is rather their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority.

Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.

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

Ah, if only there were two of me, she thought, one who spoke and the other who listened, one who lived and one who watched, how I would love myself! I would envy no one.

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.

I went to get a detective story. You have to kill time. But time will kill me too - and there´s the true, preestablished balance.

And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.

The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself.

Every time a man dies, a child dies too, and an adolescent and a young man as well; everyone weeps for the one who was dear to him.

Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death.

there is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.

The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or castle; it stands for permanence and separation from the world.