Simone de Beauvoir

“All she had to do was make the simplest of gestures - open her hands and let go her hold. She lifted one hand and moved the fingers of it; they responded, in surprise and obedience, and this obedience of a thousand little unsuspected muscles was in itself a miracle. Why ask for more?”

“The thing I understood least of all was that knowledge led to despair and damnation. Our spiritual mentor had not said that those bad books had given a false picture of life: if that had been the case, he could easily have exposed their falsehood; the tragedy of the little girl whom he had failed to bring to salvation was that she had made a premature discovery of the true nature of reality. Well, anyhow, I thought, I shall discover it myself one day, and it isn’t going to kill me: the idea that there was a certain age when knowledge of the truth could prove fatal I found offensive to common sense.”

“La fatalité triomphe dès que l'on croit en elle.”

“Un enfant, c'est un insurgé.”

“The validity of the cook's work is to be found only in the mouths of those at her table; she needs their approbation, demands that they appreciate her dishes and call for second helpings; she is upset if they are not hungry, to the point that one wonders whether the fried potatoes are for her husband or her husband for the fried potatoes.”

“When she does not find love, she may find poetry. Because she does not act, she observes, she feels, she records; a color, a smile awakens profound echoes within her; her destiny is outside her, scattered in cities already built, on the faces of men already marked by life, she makes contact, she relishes with passion and yet in a manner more detached, more free, than that of a young man. Being poorly integrated in the universe of humanity and hardly able to adapt herself therein, she, like the child, is able to see it objectively; instead of being interested solely in her grasp on things, she looks for their significance; she catches their special outlines, their unexpected metamorphoses. She rarely feels a bold creativeness, and usually she lacks the technique of self-expression; but in her conversation, her letters, her literary essays, her sketches, she manifests an original sensitivity. The young girl throws herself into things with ardor, because she is not yet deprived of her transcendence; and the fact that she accomplishes nothing, that she is nothing, will make her impulses only the more passionate. Empty and unlimited, she seeks from within her nothingness to attain All.”

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

“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.”

“I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.”

“Ya había sentido eso antes, como esta noche, que su ser se disolvía en provecho de seres inaccesibles, pero nunca había visto con una lucidez tan perfecta su propio aniquilamiento.”

“...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.”

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

“A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man.”

“Ženama se ne rađamo, nego postajemo”

“Stamattina ho avuto un'illuminazione: è tutta colpa mia. Il mio errore pià grave è stato di non capire che il tempo passa. Il tempo passava e io ero fissa nell'atteggiamento della sposa ideale di un marito ideale. Invece di rianimare la nostra vita sessuale m'incantavo nel ricordo delle nostre notti di una volta. Mi immaginavo di aver conservato il mio viso e il mio corpo di trent'anni invece di curare il mio fisico. Ho lasciato atrofizzare la mia intelligenza; non mi coltivavo più; mi dicevo: 'più tardi, quando le bambine mi avranno lasciata'. Si, la giovane studentessa che Maurice sposò, che si appassionava agli avvenimenti, alle idee, ai libri, era ben diversa dalla donna di oggi, il cui universo è tutto in queste quattro mura. Ed è vero che avevo la tendenza a imprigionarvi Maurice. credevo che la sua famiglia dovesse bastargli, credevo di averlo tutto per me. In generale davo tutto per scontato, e questo deve averlo seccato, lui che cambia, che mette sempre in questione tutte le cose. La noia non perdona"-Una donna spezzata-”

“The people of former times [...] they're dead that's the only thing they have over the living but in their own day they were just as sickening. Picturesqueness: I don't fall for that not for one minute. Stinking filthy dirty washing cabbage-stalks what a pretentious fool you have to be to go into such ecstasies over that! And it's the same thing everywhere all the time whether they're stuffing themselves with chips paella or pizza it's the same crew a filthy crew the rich who trample over you the poor who hate you for your money the old who dodder the young who sneer the men who show off the women who open their legs. I'd rather stay at home reading a thriller although they've become so dreary nowadays. The telly too what a clapped-out set of fools! I was made for another planet altogether I mistook the way.”

“No dia em que for possível à mulher amar na totalidade, não na sua fraqueza, não para fugir de si mesma mas para se encontrar, não para se demitir mas para se afirmar, nesse dia o amor tornar-se-á para ela, como para o homem, fonte de vida e não perigo mortal”

“Nenhuma mulher escreveu o Processo, Moby Dick ou os Sete Pilares da Sabedoria. Elas não contestam a condição humana, porque mal começam a assumi-la integralmente. É o que explica porque razão as suas obras carecem de ressonâncias metafísicas e também de humor negro; elas não põem o mundo entre parênteses, não lhe fazem perguntas, não denunciam as contradições: levam-no a sério”

“As razões práticas invocadas contra o aborto legal não têm qualquer peso; quanto às razões morais, reduzem-se ao velho argumento católico: o feto possui uma alma a que se veda o paraíso, suprimindo-o antes do baptismo. É de observar que a igreja autoriza, ocasionalmente, a morte de homens feitos: nas guerras ou quando se trata de condenados à morte; reserva, porém, para o feto, um humanitarismo intransigente.”

“Lo que es seguro es que ahora es muy difícil para las mujeres asumir a un tiempo su condición de individuo autónomo y su destino femenino; es la fuente de estas torpezas y malestares que a veces las presenta como "un sexo perdido". Y sin duda es más cómodo sufrir la esclavitud ciega que trabajar por la liberación: los muertos también están mejor adaptados a la tierra que los vivos.”

“all success cloaks a surrender”

“But I must admit I didn´t like that idea; do the same thing as everyone else. Eating to live, living to eat - that had been the nightmare of my adolescence. If it meant going back to that, if would be just as well to turn on the gas at once. But I suppose everyone thinks of things like that: let´s turn on the gas at once. And you don´t turn it on.”

“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.”

“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.”

“There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.”

“One afternoon Clairaut came over to me with a book in his hand: “Mademoiselle de Beauvoir,” he began, in an inquisitorial tone, “what do you make of Brochard who is of the opinion that Aristotle’s God would be able to experience sexual pleasure?” Herbaud cast him a disdainful look: “I should hope so, for his sake,” he haughtily replied.”

“I was very fond of Lagneau’s phrase: “I have no comfort but in my absolute despair.”

“In fact, the sickness I was suffering from was that I had been driven out of the paradise of childhood and had not found my place in the world of adults. I had set myself up in the absolute in order to gaze down upon this world which was rejecting me; now, if I wanted to act, to write a book, to express myself, I would have to go back down there: but my contempt had annihilated it, and I could see nothing but emptiness. The fact is that I had not yet put my hand to the plow. Love, action, literary work: all I did was to roll these ideas round in my head; I was fighting in an abstract fashion against abstract possibilities, and I had come to the conclusion that reality was of the most pitiful insignificance. I was hoping to hold fast to something, and misled by the violence of this indefinite desire, I was confusing it with the desire for the infinite.”

“The books I liked became a Bible from which I drew advice and support; I copied out long passages from them; I memorized new canticles and new litanies, psalms, proverbs, and prophecies, and I sanctified every incident in my life by the recital of these sacred texts. My emotions, my tears, and my hopes were no less sincere on account of that; the words and the cadences, the lines and the verses were not aids to make believe: but they rescued from silent oblivion all those intimate adventures of the spirit that I couldn’t speak to anyone about; they created a kind of communion between myself and those twin souls which existed somewhere out of reach; instead of living out my small private existence, I was participating in a great spiritual epic.”

“…but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.”

“To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.”

“Categoria Celuilalt este în aceeaşi măsură originară ca şi conştiinţaînsăşi. In societăţile cele mai primitive, în mitologiile cele maivechi, se regăseşte întotdeauna o dualitate care este a Aceluiaşi şi aCeluilalt.”

“É completamente estúpido escrever cartas de amor, não pode ser transcrito através de uma simples carta, mas o que fazer quando este horrível oceano nos separa do homem que amamos?”

“Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies.”

“In particular those who are condemned to stagnation are often pronounced happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being at rest. This notion we reject, for our perspective is that of existentialist ethics. Every subject plays his part as such specifically through exploits or projects that serve as a mode of transcendence; he achieves liberty only through a continual reaching out towards other liberties. There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence falls back into immanence, stagnation, there is a degradation of existence into the ‘en-sois’ – the brutish life of subjection to given conditions – and of liberty into constraint and contingence. This downfall represents a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it spells frustration and oppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil. Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects.”

“If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it "a discussion”

“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.”

“The sin of smiling whilst Louise was weeping, the sin of shedding my own tears and not hers. The sin of being another being.”

“To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.”

“[...]maintenant je n'ai plus de regrets,parce que les choses qui n'existent pas pour moi,il me semble qu'elles n'existent absolument pas.”

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

“Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.”

“No one would take me just as I was, no one loved me; I shall love myself enough, I thought, to make up for this abandonment by everyone. Formerly, I had been quite satisfied with myself, but I had taken very little trouble to increase my self-knowledge; from now on, I would stand outside myself, watch over and observe myself; in my diary I had long conversations with myself. I was entering a world whose newness stunned me. I learned to distinguish between distress and melancholy, lack of emotion and serenity; I learned to recognize the hesitations of the heart, and its ecstasies, the splendor of great renunciations, and the subterranean murmurings of hope. I entered into exalted trances, as on those evenings when I used to gaze upon the sky full of moving clouds behind the distant blue of the hills; I was both the landscape and its beholder: I existed only through myself, and for myself… My path was clearly marked: I had to perfect, enrich and express myself in a work of art that would help others to live.”

“To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.”

“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.”

“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.”

“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.”

“A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into?”

“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.”

“My overflowing leisure handed me the world and at the same time prevented me from seeing it. Just as the sun, filtering through the closed venetian blinds on a hot afternoon, makes the whole magnificence of summer blaze in my mind; whereas if I face its direct harsh glare it blinds me.”