Quotes from Simone de Beauvoir

Ser libre es lanzarse en el mundo sin cálculo, sin apuestas, es definir uno mismo toda apuesta, toda medida.

That is why Saint-Just, who believed in the individual and who knew that all authority is violence, said with somber lucidity, "No one governs innocently.

Let us live before asking us to justify our existence

Es wird Abend, aber die Luft ist noch lau. Dies ist einer jener ergreifender Augenblicke, in denen Erde und Menschen so vollkommen miteinander harmonieren, dass es unmöglich scheint, jemanden zu finden, der nicht glücklich ist.

Of all these myths none is more firmly anchored in masculine hearts than that of the feminine mystery. It has numerous advantages. And first of all it permits an easy explanation of all that appears inexplicable; the man who does not understand a woman is happy to substitute an objective resistance for a subjective deficiency of mind; instead of admitting his ignorance, he perceives the presence of a mystery outside himself; an alibi, indeed, that flatters laziness and vanity at once.

In 1949 Beauvoir could see that women would be able to shed their old skins and cut their own clothes, only 'if there is a collective change' (see here).

I got the desire to write very young, at fourteen or fifteen years of age … I endured the world which was given to me sometimes with joy, often with revolt or boredom; I wanted to make it mine in order to justify it in some way. So I thought I had everything to say: the whole world, life, everything. In my youthful, adolescent diaries, at eighteen, nineteen years old, this leitmotif appears over and over: I will say everything, I have everything to say.

Au galop mes jours m'échappent et en chacun d'eux je languis.

And so, quite unable to fulfil himself in solitude, man is incessantly in danger in his relations with his fellows: his life is a difficult enterprise with success never assured.

Benim olan tek gerçek, edimlerimdir.

She was often late, not because she didn't care, but because she had too many contradictory cares.

I was clean straight uncompromising. No cheating: I've had that in my bones since I was a child.

I weep, therefore I love

Je me passerais bien, comme vous pouvez le penser, de toutes ces distractions; c'est si assommant de s'amuser quand on n'en sent à aucun degré le besoin.

It is useless to try to integrate life and death and to behave rationally in the presence of something that is not rational: each must manage as well as he can in the tumult of his feelings. I can understand all last wishes and the total absence of them: the hugging of the bones or the abandonment of the body of the one you love to the common grave.

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

Ancak kendimden d??ar? ç?k?nca vard?r sevinç, tadland???m ÅŸeylere baÄŸland???m, varl???m? dünyaya katt???m zaman vard?r.

Y, ¿ante los ojos de quién mi conducta es fuga, si para mí es libre elección de un fin?

We had taken to living out of step. I resented his gaiety now that I had become low-spirited.

Not only do we assert that the existentialist doctrine permits the elaboration of an ethics, but it even appears to us as the only philosophy in which an ethics has its place.

Kocham ró?e; sÄ… kwiatami uroczystymi, które umierajÄ…, nie wiednÄ…c, w ukÅ'onie.

Es en el objeto finito que crea, donde el hombre, encontrará un reflejo fijo de su trascendencia.

Women] have no history, religion of their own, and they are not like the proletarian solidarity work and interests (…) They live dispersed among men, attached by housing, labor, economic, social condition in some men – fathers or husbands – more closely than other women

The most scandalous aspect of any scandal is that one gets used to it.