Simone de Beauvoir Quotes - Page 6

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.

Buying is a profound pleasure.

The renewed use of lobotomy today is particularly applicable to women: Because they do routine things, it is possible to take away their spirit of revolt, of debate, of criticism, and still leave them perfectly capable of making stews or washing dishes. It's terrible, this tendency to consider women something dangerous to society.

Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me

A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong.

It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.

I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.

…but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.

The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.

Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive.

Let women be provided with living strength of their own. Let them have the means to attack the world and wrest from it their own subsistence, and their dependence will be abolished -- that of man also.

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

A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into?

I admire Freud a great deal as a person and thinker. Despite everything, I find his work very, very rich, but I think that for women he has been absolutely disastrous. And even more so, everyone who came after him.

There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.

No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.

The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them.

Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.

The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.

In 1949, I believed that social progress, the triumph of the proletariat, socialism would lead to the emancipation of women. But I saw that nothing came of it: first of all, that socialism was not achieved anywhere, and that in certain countries which called themselves socialist, the situation of women was no better than it was in so-called capitalist countries.

Every time I start on a new book, I am a beginner again. I doubt myself, I grow discouraged, all the work accomplished in the past is as though it never was, my first drafts are so shapeless that it seems impossible to go on with the attempt at all, right up until the moment - always imperceptible, there, too, there is a break - when it is has become impossible not to finish it.

It is doubtless impossible to approach any human problems with a mind free from bias.

Patience is one of those feminine qualities which have their origin in our oppression but should be preserved after our liberation.

‎A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.

One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.