Quote

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.

Simone de Beauvoir

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Simone de Beauvoir
Age: 78 †
Born: 1908
Born: January 9
Died: 1986
Died: April 14
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Political Activist
Political Philosopher
Paris
France
Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Castor
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Going
Memories
Bringing
Time
Attitude
Sexual
Life
Goes
Ideal
Mistake
Former
Worst
Ideals
Brooded
Wife
Husband
Grasping
Night
Instead
Happily
Together
Relationship
Nights

More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

Image
One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, I will always be here.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
It is for man to establish the reign of liberty in the midst of the world of the given. To gain the supreme victory, it is necessary, for one thing, that by and through their natural differentiation men and women unequivocally affirm their brotherhood.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
Art is an attempt to integrate evil.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one being active and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
The time that one gains cannot be accumulated in a storehouse it is contradictory to want to save up existence, which, the fact is, exists only by being spent and there is a good case for showing that airplanes, machines, the telephone, and the radio do not make men of today happier than those of former times.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
All oppression creates a state of war.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
That a whole part of the middle class detests me... is utterly normal. I would be troubled if the contrary were true.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
On ne na|t pas femme: on le devient. One is not born a woman: one becomes a woman.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
It must be said in addition that the men with the most scrupulous respect for embryonic life are also those who are most zealous when it comes to condemning adults to death in war.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
To show your true ability is always, in a sense, to surpass the limits of your ability, to go a little beyond them: to dare, to seek, to invent it is at such a moment that new talents are revealed, discovered, and realized
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately.
Simone de Beauvoir