"I don't want to be just another blade of grass."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Simone de Beauvoir quotes (page 14 of 18)
355 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Marriage is traditionally the destiny offered to women by society. Most women are married or have been, or plan to be or suffer from not being."
Read quote
3 likes
"One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one."
Read quote
3 likes
"Can one say that there is a way of crying out, of speaking, which is properly feminine? Personally, I don't think so. In the end, I find this is another way of putting women in a kind of singularity, a ghetto, which is not what I want. I want them to be singular and universal at the same time."
Read quote
3 likes
"Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change."
Read quote
3 likes
"A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity."
Read quote
3 likes
"Work almost always has a double aspect: it is a bondage, a wearisome drudgery; but it is also a source of interest, a steadying element, a factor that helps to integrate the worker with society. Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap."
Read quote
3 likes
"there is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars."
Read quote
3 likes
"Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death."
Read quote
3 likes
"Every time a man dies, a child dies too, and an adolescent and a young man as well; everyone weeps for the one who was dear to him."
Read quote
3 likes
"Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction."
Read quote
3 likes
"The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself."
Read quote
3 likes
"I went to get a detective story. You have to kill time. But time will kill me too - and there´s the true, preestablished balance."
Read quote
3 likes
"Ah, if only there were two of me, she thought, one who spoke and the other who listened, one who lived and one who watched, how I would love myself! I would envy no one."
Read quote
3 likes
"To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision."
Read quote
3 likes
"Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness."
Read quote
3 likes
"Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom."
Read quote
3 likes
"There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.' There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me."
Read quote
3 likes
"To create a language all of a piece which would be a women's language, that I find quite insane. There does not exist a mathematics which is only a women's mathematics, or a feminine science."
Read quote
3 likes
"Habit has a kind of poetry."
Read quote
3 likes