Simone de Beauvoir

“When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].”

“I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.”

“No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.”

“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.”

“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.”

“...مرگ عزیز، مرگی که زیبایی گل‌ها از اوست، شیرینی جوانی از اوست، مرگی که به کاروکردار انسان، به سخاوت و بی‌باکی و جانفشانی و از خودگذشته‌گی او معنا می‌دهد، مرگی که همه‌ی ارزش زنده‌گی بسته به اوست...”

“In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.”

“For twenty years it seemed to me that I had been taking part in a game, and that one day, at the stroke of midnight, I would return to the land of shadows. ...In a little while, the hands would be pointing to midnight; they would point to midnight tomorrow and the next day, and I would still be here.”

“People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls.”

“She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.”

“She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust.”

“The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.”

“Les livres que j'aimais devinrent une Bible où je puisais des conseils et des secours. ”

“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.”

“There was once a man who lost his shadow. I forget what happened to him, but it was dreadful. As for me, I've lost my own image. I did not look at it often; but it was there, in the background, just as Maurice had drawn it for me. A straightforward, genuine, "authentic" woman, with out mean-mindedness, uncompromising, but at the same time understanding, indulgent, sensitive, deeply feeling, intensely aware of things and of people, passionately devoted to those she loved and creating happiness for them. A fine life, serene, full, "harmonious." It is dark: I cannot see myself anymore. And what do the others see? Maybe something hideous.”

“Tragedies are all right for a while: you are concerned, you are curious, you feel good. And then it gets repetitive, it doesn't advance, it grows dreadfully boring: it is so very boring, even for me.”

“There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial...Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost...I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself!”

“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.”

“Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself - exactly oneself and no one else - and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else.”

“Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.”

“What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.”

“It must feel wonderfully strange when, like Manette, one stands there, the only witness to a vanished world.”

“The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it.”

“My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.”

“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.”

“--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.”

“Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me”

“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.”

“Je crois que je comprends bien comment ca peut te faire. Nous avons essayée de batir notre amour par-delà les instants, mais seuls les instants sont surs. Pour le reste on a besoin de foi; et la foi, est-ce courage ou paresse?”

“The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project”

“Sex pleasure in women is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.”

“One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others.”

“If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.”

“On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.”

“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.”

“All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception.”

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

“One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.”