"Sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken."
Read quote
36 likes
Quote collection
Simone de Beauvoir quotes (page 3 of 18)
355 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Marriage is a career which brings about more benefits than many others."
Read quote
35 likes
"Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you've lost that, you've lost everything."
Read quote
33 likes
"Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it."
Read quote
31 likes
"I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end."
Read quote
31 likes
"Be loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody."
Read quote
31 likes
"Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. But we have seen that it is one of the lies of the serious mind to attempt to give the word "useful" an absolute meaning; nothing is useful if it is not useful to man; nothing is useful to man if the latter is not in a position to define his own ends and values, if he is not free."
Read quote
30 likes
"There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience."
Read quote
30 likes
"To be feminist doesn't mean simply to do nothing, to reduce yourself to total impotence under the pretext of refusing masculine values. There is a problematic, a very difficult dialectic between accepting power and refusing it, accepting certain masculine values, and wanting to transform them. I think it's worth a try."
Read quote
29 likes
"It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world."
Read quote
28 likes
"Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male."
Read quote
28 likes
"To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other...when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form."
Read quote
27 likes
"A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself."
Read quote
27 likes
"To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude."
Read quote
26 likes
"From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity."
Read quote
26 likes
"Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying."
Read quote
24 likes
"To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody."
Read quote
24 likes
"The nearer I come to the end of my days, the more I am enabled to see that strange thing, a life, and to see it whole."
Read quote
24 likes
"Society turns away from the aged worker as though he belonged to another species. That is why the whole question is buried in a conspiracy of silence. Old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization."
Read quote
24 likes
"In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality."
Read quote
24 likes