Quotes from Simone de Beauvoir

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.

To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God's absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, & his victories as well.

No subject posits itself spontaneously and at once as the inessential from the outset; it is not the Other who, defining itself as Other, defines the One; the Other is posited as Other by the One positing itself as One. But in order for the Other not to turn into the One, the Other has to submit to this foreign point of view.

Faith allows an evasion of those difficulties which the atheist confronts honestly. And to crown all, the believer derives a sense of great superiority from this very cowardice itself.

As far as I am concerned sexuality no longer exists. I used to call this indifference serenity: all at once I have come to see it in another light—it is a mutilation; it is the loss of a sense. The lack of it makes me blind to the needs, the pains, and the joys of those who do possess it.

The monologue is her form of revenge. FLAUBERT

C'est par le travail que la femme a conquis sa dignité d'être humain; mais ce fut une conquête singulièrement dure et lente.

It is a mistake to seek in fantasies the key to concrete behaviour; for fantasies are created and cherished as fantasies. The little girl who dreams of violation with mingled horror and acquiescence does not really wish to be violated and if such a thing should happen it would be a hateful calamity.

Man may reproach women for their dissimulation, but his complacency must be great indeed for him to be so constantly duped.

I enjoyed my exhaustion, though; I liked overdoing things

Between women love is contemplation; caresses are meant less to appropriate the other than to recreate oneself slowly through her; separation is eliminated, there is neither fight nor victory nor defeat; each one is both subject and object

La fatalité triomphe dès que l'on croit en elle.

They use the pretext of avoiding war, to make you swallow any kind of peace, said Paul. They use the pretext of a revolution to involve us in any kind of war, said Jardinet.

Today it strikes me that the most important aspect of these conversations was not so much what we said as what we took for granted, and what in fact was not so at all. We were wrong about almost everything. An accurate character sketch must take these errors into account, since they expressed one kind of reality - our actual situation.

at the end of the last century, the police discovered two little girls of twelve or thirteen in a bordello; a trial was held where they testified; they spoke of their clients, who were important gentlemen; one of them opened her mouth to give a name. The judge abruptly stopped her: Do not sully the name of an honest man!

Always the same faces, the same surroundings, the same conversations, the same problems. The more it changes, the more it repeats itself. In the end, you feel as if you're dying alive.

She had appetites in plenty: she spent all her strength in repressing them and she underwent this denial in anger.

From a New York Times biography from May 27, 2010 entitled Introduction to Simone de Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex' ] Beauvoir herself was as devout an atheist as she had once been a Catholic, and she dismisses religions — even when they worship a goddess — as the inventions of men to perpetuate their dominion.

Peut-être vas-tu me trouver ridicule, mais je me mépriserais de n'oser l'être jamais.

We have seen that it is possible to escape the temptations of sadism and masochism when both partners recognize each other as equals; as soon as there is a little modesty and some generosity between men and women, ideas of victory and defeat are abolished: the act of love becomes a free exchange.

It must feel wonderfully strange when, like Manette, one stands there, the only witness to a vanished world.

Aujourd'hui, je n'ai pas vécu

I would have to have a bit of heroism and get out of myself. But I love myself so much!

To make something good of the future, you have to look the present in the face.