Simone De Beauvoir Quotes

To create a language all of a piece which would be a women's language, that I find quite insane. There does not exist a mathematics which is only a women's mathematics, or a feminine science.

Habit has a kind of poetry.

Buying is profound pleasure.

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.

When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.

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

it is so difficult not to become vain about one's own good luck.

It is impossible to do anything for anyone.

The writer can't stop her unconscious from showing up, that's certain.

If the unconscious must express itself it will do so through the work that you do consciously or subconsciously, with words, with what you have to say.

That a whole part of the middle class detests me... is utterly normal. I would be troubled if the contrary were true.

There was a time, in the nineteenth century, for example, when women spoke mostly about the house, children, birth, and so forth, because it was their domain. That's changing a little, now.

The individuals who seem to us most outstanding, who are honored with the name of genius, are those who have proposed to enact the fate of all humanity in their personal existences.

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

The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.

What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class.

Choice springs from the totality of the person. Thus, to study, to analyze what a person is, does not eliminate the idea of freedom.

You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde.

Literature in France seems to be undergoing a crisis now, and nothing comes immediately to mind.

A man of the right doesn't write in the same way as a man of the left, you can see that right away, or a woman of the right or a woman of the left.

It's so easy to be mistaken about the future. Sometimes there are avant-gardes which believe themselves to be the avant-garde and which later find themselves to be absolutely dated.

I think there is a great tendency toward autobiography among women today. It is perhaps facile - and I say that even though I have written one myself.

There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem.

I am not at all for a feminism which is entirely separatist, which would say, "this domain is purely for women." I don't believe that at all.

A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.

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.

... to adapt one's outlook to another person's salvation is the surest and quickest way of losing him.

If you haven't been happy very young, you can still be happy later on, but it's much harder. You need more luck.

Old age is better for women than for men. First of all, they have less far to fall, since their lives are more mediocre than those of most men.

A writer is hoisted up onto a pedestal only to scrutinize him more closely and conclude that it was a mistake to put him up there in the first place.

Cooking is revolution and creation.

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

Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately.

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.

Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself.

I was very fond of Lagneau’s phrase: “I have no comfort but in my absolute despair.

In truth we need to change the society itself, men as well as women, to change everything.

Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.

Dwelling-place and food are useful for life but give it no significance: the immediate goals of the housekeeper are only means, not true ends.

At bottom, antipsychiatry is still psychiatry. And it doesn't really address itself to women's problems.

If the writer is a woman, feminist or not, it will give the language something that it would not have if it had been used by a man.

Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours.

The arrogance of some Christians would close heaven to them if, to their misfortune, it existed.

You can't address yourself to women by speaking a language which no average woman will understand. In my opinion, it's wrong.

One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion

I was too much of an extremist to be able to live under the eye of God and at the same time say both yes and no to life

It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator burdened with all the contradictions in the world.

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 I were to share Jaques' existence I would find it hard to hold my own against him, for already I found his nihilism contagious.

But I was brought up on convent morals and paternal nationalism, I was getting bogged down in contradictions.