Quotes from Simone de Beauvoir

She offered her mouth to him, as if enchanted. A Persian princess, a little Indian, a fox, a morning glory, a lovely wisteria--it always pleased them when you told them they looked like something, like something else.

all success cloaks a surrender

I was very fond of Lagneau's phrase: "I have no comfort but in my absolute despair.

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.

The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.

All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn´t come fast enough. Instead of being open, you´re closed up tight. That´s the worst sin of all - the sin of omission.

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

I tried to love you less.I couldn't.

You have never had any confidence in him. And if he has no confidence in himself it is because he sees himself through your eyes.

To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.

My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together.

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity no to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

If I want to define myself, I first have to say, "I am a woman"; all other assertions will arise from this basic truth. A man never begins by positing himself as an individual of a certain sex: that he is a man is obvious.

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.

Girls are weighed down by restrictions, boys with demands - two equally harmful disciplines.

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.

Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.

I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.

I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.

It is dreadful to think that behind me my own past is no longer anything but shifting darkness.

Man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it.

That the child is the supreme aim of woman is a statement having precisely the value of an advertising slogan.

He formed his sentences hesitantly and then threw them at me with such force that I felt as if I were receiving a present each time

There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time. --But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.