"I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where i slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat."
Quote collection
Simone de Beauvoir quotes (page 4 of 18)
355 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body."
"I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing."
"To give space when what one most yearns for is closeness, that is both the great test and great tragedy of love."
"Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men."
"It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living."
"Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth."
"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."
"The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning."
"Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart."
"There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless."
"In 1949, I believed that social progress, the triumph of the proletariat, socialism would lead to the emancipation of women. But I saw that nothing came of it: first of all, that socialism was not achieved anywhere, and that in certain countries which called themselves socialist, the situation of women was no better than it was in so-called capitalist countries."
"It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time."
"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."
"Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility."
"Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful."
"Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority."
"One can hardly tell women that washing up saucepans is their divine mission, [so] they are told that bringing up children is their divine mission. But the way things are in the world, bringing up children has a great deal in common with washing up saucepans."
"The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project"
"Most feminists in France came to feminism after '68 as a result of the hypocrisy they experienced in leftist movements. In these movements, where everyone believed there was going to be true equality, fraternity between men and women, and that together they were going to struggle against this rotten society, even there they noticed that the leftists, the militants, kept them "in their place." Women made the coffee while the others did the talking; they were the ones who typed the letters."