Quotes from Simone de Beauvoir

Economically, men and women almost form two castes; all things being equal, the former have better jobs, higher wages, and greater chances to succeed than their new female competitors; they occupy many more places in industry, in politics, and so forth, and they hold the most important positions.

For Zaza If there are tears in my eyes tonight, is it because you are no longer alive, or because I am? I should dedicate this story to you, but I know that you no longer exist anywhere, and my writing to you like this is pure literary artifice. In any case, this isn't really your story, only one inspired by us. You were not Andrée; nor was I Sylvie, who speaks in my name.

Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.

The fear of death never left me; I couldn't get used to the thought; I would still sometimes shake and weep with terror. By contrast, the fact of existence here and now sometimes took on a glorious splendour.

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.

History took hold of me and never let me go thereafter.

It is difficult for men to measure the enormous extent of social discrimination that seems insignificant form the outside and whose moral and intellectual repercussions are so deep in woman that they appear to spring from an original nature. The man most sympathetic to women never knows her concrete situation fully.

Das Glück besteht darin, zu leben wie alle Welt und doch wie kein anderer zu sein.

one of the problems he will seek to solve is how to make his wife both a servant and a companion; his attitude will evolve throughout the centuries, and this will also entail an evolution in woman's destiny.11

I was no longer a vacant mind, an abstracted gaze, but the turbulent fragrance of the waving grain, the intimate smell of the heather moors, the dense heat of noon or the shiver of twilight; I was heavy; yet I was as vapour in the blue airs of summer and knew no bounds.

But I miss you to the point of anguish.

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.

A woman's situation, i.e those meanings derived from the total context in which she comes to maturity, disposes her to apprehend her body not as instrument of her transcendence, but an object destined for another.

When you stubbornly give one man a chance, you arbitrarily deny it to another one.

Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects. pg. xxxiii

The world brings itself into being before my eyes in an everlasting present: I grow used to its different aspects so quickly that it does not seem to me to change.

It must be added that the men who most respect embryonic life are the same ones who do not hesitate to send adults to death in war.

Elles [Rosa Luxembourg, Marie Curie] démontrent avec éclat que ce n'est pas l'infériorité des femmes qui a déterminé leur insignifiance historique: c'est leur insignifiance historique qui les a vouées à l'infériorité.

Du jour où il nait, l'homme commence à mourir; c'est la vérité qu'incarne la Mère.

Life has made me discover the world as it is, that is, a world of suffering and oppression, of undernourishment for the majority of people, things that I didn't know when I was young and when I imagined that to discover the world was to discover something beautiful.

symbolism did not fall out of heaven or rise out of subterranean depths: it was elaborated like language, by the human reality…

One afternoon Clairaut came over to me with a book in his hand: "Mademoiselle de Beauvoir," he began, in an inquisitorial tone, "what do you make of Brochard who is of the opinion that Aristotle's God would be able to experience sexual pleasure?" Herbaud cast him a disdainful look: "I should hope so, for his sake," he haughtily replied.

To lose confidence in one's body is to lose confidence in oneself.

On nous exhorte: 'Soyez femmes, restez femmes, devenez femmes.' Tout être humain femelle n'est donc pas nécessairament une femme; il lui faut participer à cette réalité mystérieuse et menacée qu'est la féminité. (...) Celle-ci est-elle sécrétée par les ovoires? Suffit-il d'un jupon à frou-frou pour la faire descendre sur terre?