Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

All those minds that are interested in finding out the truth communicate with each other across the distances of space and time. I, too, was taking part in the effort which humanity makes to know.

Being on the fringes of the world is not the best place for someone who intends to re-create it: here again, to go beyond the given, one must be deeply rooted in it. Personal accomplishments are almost impossible in human categories collectively kept in an inferior situation.

My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy.

I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself

No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.

...her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.

The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.

Woman has ovaries and a uterus; such are the particular conditions that lock her in her subjectivity; some even say she thinks with her hormones. Man vainly forgets that his anatomy also contains hormones and testicles. He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world that he believes he apprehends in all objectivity, whereas he considers womans body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that particularizes it.

The fact is that men encounter more complicity in their woman companions than the oppressor usually finds in the oppressed; and in bad faith they use it as a pretext to declare that woman wanted the destiny they imposed on her. We have seen that in reality her whole education conspires to bar her from paths of revolt and adventure; all of society - beginning with her respected parents - lies to her in extolling the high value of love, devotion, and the gift of self and in concealing the fact that neither lover, husband nor children will be disposed to bear the burdensome responsibility of it. She cheerfully accepts these lies because they invite her to take the easy slope: and that is the worst of the crimes committed against her; from her childhood and throughout her life, she is spoiled, she is corrupted by the fact that this resignation, tempting to any existent anxious about her freedom, is mean to be her vocation; if one encourages a child to be lazy by entertaining him all day, without giving him the occasion to study, without showing him its value, no one will say when he reaches the age of man that he chose to be incapable and ignorant; this is how the woman is raised, without ever being taught the necessity of assuming her own existence; she readily lets herself count on the protection, love, help and guidance of others; she lets herself be fascinated by the hope of being able to realise her being without doing anything. She is wrong to yield to this temptation; but the man is ill advised to reproach her for it since it is he himself who tempted her.

How could women ever have had genius when all possibility of accomplishing a work of genius - or just a work - was refused them?

How could van Gogh have been born woman? A woman would not have been sent on mission to Boringe, she would not have felt mens misery as her own crime, she would not have sought redemption; so she would never have painted van Goghs sunflowers. And this without taking into account that the painters kind of life - the solitude in Arles, going to cafés, whorehouses, everything that feed into van Goghs art by feeding his sensibility - would have been prohibited to her. A woman could never have become Kafka: in her doubts and anxieties, she would never have recognised the anguish of Man driven from paradise.

In truth, to go for a walk with ones eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial, perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that right now they do most obviously exist.

Scriassine studied me in turn. Youre not so dumb, you know. Generally I dislike intelligent women, maybe because theyre not intelligent enough. They always want to prove to themselves, and to everyone else, how terribly smart they are. So all they do is talk and never understand anything. What struck me the first time I saw you was that way you have of keeping quiet.

The feminine body is expected to be flesh, but discreetly so;

If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression.

The relation of woman to husband, of of daughter to father, of sister to brother, is a relation of vassalage.

she gives birth in pain, she heals males wounds, she nurses the newborn and buries the dead; of man she knows all that offends his pride and humiliates his will. While inclining before him and submitting flesh to spirit, she remains on the carnal borders of the spirit; and she contests the sharpness of hard masculine architecture by softening the angles; she introduces free luxury and unforeseen grace.

; the man who does not understand a woman is happy to replace his subjective deficiency with an objective resistance; instead of admitting his ignorance, he recognizes the presence of a mystery exterior to himself: here is an excuse that flatters his laziness and vanity at the same time.

The relation of woman to husband, of daughter to father, of sister to brother, is a relation of vassalage.

Taking without being taken in the anguish of becoming prey is the dangerous game of adolescent feminine sexuality.