Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Facts
Misfortunes
Firsts
Result
First
Therefore
Children
Results
Men
Child
Exigencies
Time
Freedom
Nostalgic
Life
Fact
Misfortune
Comes
Concealed
More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir
Anais Nin shows an occasional grace in writing, but her work is quite foreign to me, precisely because she wants so much to be feminine and not feminist. And then she is so gaga before so many men. She talks about men I know in France, men who were less than nothing, and she considers them kings, extraordinary people.
Simone de Beauvoir
The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.
Simone de Beauvoir
If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through the eternal feminine, and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman?
Simone de Beauvoir
Work almost always has a double aspect: it is a bondage, a wearisome drudgery but it is also a source of interest, a steadying element, a factor that helps to integrate the worker with society. Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
Simone de Beauvoir
The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams.
Simone de Beauvoir
A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.
Simone de Beauvoir
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 not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.
Simone de Beauvoir
To create a language all of a piece which would be a women's language, that I find quite insane. There does not exist a mathematics which is only a women's mathematics, or a feminine science.
Simone de Beauvoir
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.
Simone de Beauvoir
Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.
Simone de Beauvoir
To give space when what one most yearns for is closeness, that is both the great test and great tragedy of love.
Simone de Beauvoir
Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.
Simone de Beauvoir
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
Ce n'est gue' re que dans les asiles que les coquettes gardent avec ente tement une foi entie' re en des regards absents normalement, elles re clament des te moins. Women fond of dress are hardly ever entirely satisfied not to be seen, except among the insane usually they want witnesses.
Simone de Beauvoir
She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.
Simone de Beauvoir
from one minute to the next the present is merely an honorary past. It must be filled unceasingly anew to dissemble the curse it carries within itself that is why Americans like speed, alcohol, thriller films and any sensational news: the demand for new things, and ever newer things, is feverish since nowhere will they rest.
Simone de Beauvoir
I would certainly like to see some young women take up psychoanalysis seriously and reconstruct it from an absolutely new viewpoint.
Simone de Beauvoir
From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.
Simone de Beauvoir
... to adapt one's outlook to another person's salvation is the surest and quickest way of losing him.
Simone de Beauvoir
