Simone de Beauvoir Quotes - Page 9

I never thought of myself as being in the avant-garde. I said what I had to say, as I was able to say it.

The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another.

The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.

When Goya was 80 he drew an ancient man propped on two sticks, with a great mass of white hair and beard all over his face, and the inscription, "I am still learning."

But women do not say 'We', except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say 'women', and women use the same word in referring to themselves.

--There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time. --But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.

I discovered feminism around 1970-72-precisely the time when feminism began to exist in France. Before that, there was no feminism.

Christianity gave eroticism its savor of sin and legend when it endowed the human female with a soul.

Eating, sleeping, cleaning - the years no longer rise up toward heaven, they lie spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won. Washing, ironing, sweeping, ferreting out rolls of lint from under wardrobes - all this halting of decay is also the denial of life; for time simultaneously creates and destroys, and only its negative aspect concerns the housekeeper.

There is a kind of universality in the human condition, masculine or feminine. That's one thing I continue to believe.

I think that Freud understood absolutely nothing about women - as he himself said.

Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.

Habit has a kind of poetry.

Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen.

Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word. Machines won't change human nature.

Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.

I was struck by the absence, even among very young boys and girls, of any interior motivation; they were incapable of thinking, of inventing, of imagining, of choosing, of deciding for themselves; this incapacity was expressed by their conformism; in every domain of life they employed only the abstract measure of money, because they were unable to trust to their own judgment.

My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.

Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.

On ne na|"t pas femme: on le devient. One is not born a woman: one becomes a woman.

The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady, yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet.

The American woman's inequality with men is proved by her defiant attitude.

There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.' There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me.