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Simone de Beauvoir
67 quotes
“Toute oppression crée un état de guerre. Ce cas-ci ne fait pas exception. L'existant que l'on considère comme inessentiel ne peut manquer de prétendre rétablir sa souveraineté. Aujourd'hui, le combat prend une autre figure; au lieu de vouloir enfermer l'homme dans un cachot, la femme essaie de s'en évader; elle ne cherche plus à l'entraîner dans les régions de l'immanence mais à émerger dans la lumière de la transcendance.”
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We must not believe, certainly, that a change in woman’s economic condition alone is enough to transform her, though this factor has been and remains the basic factor in her evolution; but until it has brought about the moral, social, cultural, and other consequences that it promises and requires, the new woman cannot appear.”
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The humanity of tomorrow will be living in its flesh and in its conscious liberty; that time will be its present and it will in turn prefer it. New relations of flesh and sentiment of which we have no conception will arise between the sexes; already, indeed, there have appeared between men and women friendships, rivalries, complicities, comradeships — chaste or sensual — which past centuries could not have conceived.”
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is for man to establish the reign of liberty in the midst of the world of the given. To gain the supreme victory, it is necessary, for one thing, that by and through their natural differentiation men and women unequivocally affirm their brotherhood.”
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Work almost always has a double aspect: it is a bondage, a wearisome drudgery; but it is also a source of interest, a steadying element, a factor that helps to integrate the worker with society. Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.”
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside — from others. We do not accept it willingly.”
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.”
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.”
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.”
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.”
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was said that I refused to grant any value to the maternal instinct and to love. This was not so. I simply asked that women should experience them truthfully and freely, whereas they often use them as excuses and take refuge in them, only to find themselves imprisoned in that refuge when those emotions have dried up in their hearts. I was accused of preaching sexual promiscuity; but at no point did I ever advise anyone to sleep with just anyone at just any time; my opinion on this subject is that all choices, agreements and refusals should be made independently of institutions, conventions and motives of self-aggrandizement; if the reasons for it are not of the same order as the act itself, then the only result can be lies, distortions and mutilations.”
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Force of Circumstances Vol. III (1963) as translated by Richard Howard (1968) - Excerpt online
“Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it. Psychiatrists have told me that they give The Second Sex to their women patients to read, and not merely to intellectual women but to lower-middle-class women, to office workers and women working in factories. 'Your book was a great help to me. Your book saved me,' are the words I have read in letters from women of all ages and all walks of life. If my book has helped women, it is because it expressed them, and they in their turn gave it its truth. Thanks to them, it is no longer a matter for scandal and concern. During these last ten years the myths that men created have crumbled, and many women writers have gone beyond me and have been far more daring than I. Too many of them for my taste take sexuality as their only theme; but at least when they write about it they now present themselves as the eye-that-looks, as subject, consciousness, freedom.”
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Force of Circumstances Vol. III (1963) as translated by Richard Howard (1968)
“When Sartre and I met not only did our backgrounds fuse, but also our solidity, our individual conviction that we were what we were made to be. In that framework we could not become rivals. Then, as the relationship between Sartre and me grew, I became convinced that I was irreplaceable in his life, and he in mine. In other words, we were totally secure in the knowledge that our relationship was also totally solid, again preordained, though, of course, we would have laughed at that word then. When you have such security it's easy not to be jealous. But had I thought that another woman played the same role as I did in Sartre's life, of course, I would have been jealous.”
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by John Gerassi in Society (January-February 1976)
“It is vain to apportion praise and blame. The truth is that if the vicious circle is so hard to break, it is because the two sexes are each the victim at once of the other and of itself. Between two adversaries confronting each other in their pure liberty, an agreement could be easily reached: the more so as the war profits neither. But the complexity of the whole affair derives from the fact that each camp is giving aid and comfort to the enemy; woman is pursuing a dream of submission, man a dream of identification. Want of authenticity does not pay: each blames the other for the unhappiness he or she has incurred in yielding to the temptations of the easy way; what man and woman loathe in each other is the shattering frustration of each one's own bad faith and baseness.”
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another; it is never the given that confers superiorities: "virtue", as the ancients called it, is defined at the level of "that which depends on us". In both sexes is played out the same drama of the flesh and the spirit, of finitude and transcendence; both are gnawed away by time and laid in wait for by death, they have the same essential need for one another; and they can gain from their liberty the same glory. If they were to taste it, they would no longer be tempted to dispute fallacious privileges, and fraternity between them could then come into existence.”
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is nonsense to assert that revelry, vice, ecstasy, passion, would become impossible if man and woman were equal in concrete matters; the contradictions that put the flesh in opposition to the spirit, the instant to time, the swoon of immanence to the challenge of transcendence, the absolute of pleasure to the nothingness of forgetting, will never be resolved; in sexuality will always be materialised the tension, the anguish, the joy, the frustration, and the triumph of existence. To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue none the less to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other. The reciprocity of their relations will not do away with the miracles — desire, possession, love, dream, adventure — worked by the division of human beings into two separate categories; and the words that move us — giving, conquering, uniting — will not lose their meaning. On the contrary, when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.”
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What should a society be, so that in his last years a man might still be a man? The answer is simple: he would always have to have been treated as a man. By the fate that it allots to its members who can no longer work, society gives itself away — it has always looked upon them as so much material. Society confesses that as far as it is concerned, profit is the only thing that counts, and that its "humanism" is mere window-dressing. In the nineteenth century the ruling classes explicitly equated the proletariat with barbarism. The struggles of the workers succeeded in making the proletariat part of mankind once more. But only in so far as it is productive. Society turns away from the aged worker as though he belonged to another species. That is why the whole question is buried in a conspiracy of silence.”
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source