— Simone de Beauvoir
"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"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."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)
"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."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself. "
— Simone de Beauvoir
"If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...]."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"I am incapable of conceiving infinity and yet I do not accept finity."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"(What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.)"
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion"
— Simone de Beauvoir
"There was once a man who lost his shadow. I forget what happened to him, but it was dreadful. As for me, I've lost my own image. I did not look at it often; but it was there, in the background, just as Maurice had drawn it for me. A straightforward, genuine, "authentic" woman, with out mean-mindedness, uncompromising, but at the same time understanding, indulgent, sensitive, deeply feeling, intensely aware of things and of people, passionately devoted to those she loved and creating happiness for them. A fine life, serene, full, "harmonious." It is dark: I cannot see myself anymore. And what do the others see? Maybe something hideous."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project"
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)
"Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"Sex pleasure in women is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)
"Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me"
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"On ne nait pas femme, on le devient."
— Simone de Beauvoir (Le deuxième sexe II)
"On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself--on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.
"
— Simone de Beauvoir
"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."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself - exactly oneself and no one else - and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial...Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost...I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself!"
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"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."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"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."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Ethics Of Ambiguity)
"Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you've lost that, you've lost everything."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"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."
— Simone de Beauvoir (Old Age)
"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."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"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."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"She offered her mouth to him, as if enchanted. A Persian princess, a little Indian, a fox, a morning glory, a lovely wisteria--it always pleased them when you told them they looked like something, like something else."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)
"A life is such a strange object, at one moment translucent, at another utterly opaque, an object I make with my own hands, an object imposed on me, an object for which the world provides the raw material and then steals it from me again, pulverized by events, scattered, broken, scored yet retaining its unity; how heavy it is and how inconsistent: this contradiction breeds many misunderstandings."
— Simone de Beauvoir (After the War: Force of Circumstance, 1944-1952)
"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 absolute truth."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female — whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"That's what I consider true generosity. You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing."
— Simone de Beauvoir
""A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"--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."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"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."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)
"Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, "I don't want to be just another blade of grass."
— Simone de Beauvoir (All Men Are Mortal)
"On the evenings when my parents held parties, the drawing-room mirrors multiplied to infinity the scintillations of a crystal chandelier. Mama would take her seat at the grand piano to accompany a lady dressed in a cloud of tulle who played the violin and a cousin who performed on a cello. I would crack between my teeth the candied shell of an artificial fruit, and a burst of light would illuminate my palate with a taste of blackcurrant or pineapple: all the colours, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held the whole party in my mouth."
— Simone de Beauvoir (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter)
"The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"Women's mutual understanding comes from the fact that they identify themselves with each other; but for the same reason each is against the others."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Ethics Of Ambiguity)
"A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Ethics Of Ambiguity)
"Les livres que j'aimais devinrent une Bible où je puisais des conseils et des secours. "
— Simone de Beauvoir (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter)
"Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simpily an all-pervasive system."
— Simone de Beauvoir (La Force Des Choses, Tome II)
"What would Prince Charming have for occupation if he had not to awaken the Sleeping beauty?"
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"...which we welcomed precisely because it happened to suit our convenience."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Prime of Life: The Autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir)
"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."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"Je crois que je comprends bien comment ca peut te faire. Nous avons essayée de batir notre amour par-delà les instants, mais seuls les instants sont surs. Pour le reste on a besoin de foi; et la foi, est-ce courage ou paresse?"
— Simone de Beauvoir (She Came to Stay)
"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! "
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)
" 'In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.' "
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)
"Les cas extrêmes nous attachaient, au même titre que les névroses et les psychoses : on y retrouvait exagérées, épurées, dotées d'un saisissant relief les attitudes et les passions des gens qu'on appelle normaux."
— Simone de Beauvoir (La Force De l'Age)
"Das Glück besteht darin, zu leben wie alle Welt und doch wie kein anderer zu sein."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"Er erzählte mir Geschichten, und vor allem ging er mit mir spazieren. Er zeigte mir Straßen und Plätze, Quais und Kanäle, die Friedhöfe, die Hafenplätze und Lagerhäuser, die unsicheren Viertel, die Kneipen - so viele Ecken von Paris, die ich nicht kannte."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"The body is the instrument of our hold on the world."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"It must feel wonderfully strange when, like Manette, one stands there, the only witness to a vanished world."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"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."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"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."
— Simone de Beauvoir (All Men Are Mortal)
"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"
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)
"Ready-made phrases and the ritual of etiquette were unknown to him; his thoughtfulness was pure improvisation, and it resembled the little inventions affection inspires."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)
"Art, literature, and philosophy are attempts to found the world anew on a human freedom: that of the creator; to foster such an aim, one must first unequivocally posit oneself as a freedom. The restrictions that education and custom impose on a woman limit her grasp of the universe...Indeed, for one to become a creator, it is not enough to be cultivated, that is, to make going to shows and meeting people part of one's life; culture must be apprehended through the free movement of a transcendence; the spirit with all its riches must project itself in an empty sky that is its to fill; but if a thousand fine bonds tie it to the earth, its surge is broken. The girl today can certainly go out alone, stroll in the Tuileries; but I have already said how hostile the street is: eyes everywhere, hands waiting: if she wanders absentmindedly, her thoughts elsewhere, if she lights a cigarette in a cafe, if she goes to the cinema alone, an unpleasant incident can quickly occur; she must inspire respect by the way she dresses and behaves: this concern rivets her to the ground and self. "Her wings are clipped." At eighteen, T.E. Lawrence went on a grand tour through France by bicycle; a young girl would never be permitted to take on such an adventure...Yet such experiences have an inestimable impact: this is how an individual in the headiness of freedom and discovery learns to look at the entire world as his fief...[The girl] may feel alone within the world: she never stands up in front of it, unique and sovereign."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Ethics Of Ambiguity)
"The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her."
— Simone de Beauvoir (A Very Easy Death)
"As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Ethics Of Ambiguity)
"...مرگ عزیز، مرگی که زیبایی گلها از اوست، شیرینی جوانی از اوست، مرگی که به کاروکردار انسان، به سخاوت و بیباکی و جانفشانی و از خودگذشتهگی او معنا میدهد، مرگی که همهی ارزش زندهگی بسته به اوست..."
— Simone de Beauvoir (همه میمیرند)
"For twenty years it seemed to me that I had been taking part in a game, and that one day, at the stroke of midnight, I would return to the land of shadows. ...In a little while, the hands would be pointing to midnight; they would point to midnight tomorrow and the next day, and I would still be here."
— Simone de Beauvoir
