Michael Malak > Michael's Quotes

“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[...].”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

“...her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.”
― Simone de Beauvoir , The Second Sex

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

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

“Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Book of Positive Quotations

“Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

“Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

“To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, Prime of Life

“If they want to flirt or initiate a friendship, they should carefully avoid giving the impression they are taking the initiative; men do not like tomboys, nor bluestockings, nor thinking women; too much audacity, culture, intelligence, or character frightens them.

In most novels, as George Eliot observes, it is the dumb, blond heroine who outshines the virile brunette; and in The Mill on the Floss, Maggie tries in vain to reverse the roles; in the end she dies and it is blond Lucy who marries Stephen. In The Last of the Mohicans, vapid Alice wins the hero’s heart and not valiant Cora; in Little Women kindly Jo is only a childhood friend for Laurie; he vows his love to curly-haired and insipid Amy.

To be feminine is to show oneself as weak, futile, passive, and docile. The girl is supposed not only to primp and dress herself up but also to repress her spontaneity and substitute for it the grace and charm she has been taught by her elder sisters. Any self-assertion will take away from her femininity and her seductiveness.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“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.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

“The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength, each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.”
― Simone DeBeauvoir

“I was very fond of Lagneau’s phrase: “I have no comfort but in my absolute despair.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

“I tried to love you less.I couldn't.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

“To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“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, The Woman Destroyed

“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, The Woman Destroyed

“If I want to define myself, I first have to say, “I am a woman”; all other assertions will arise from this basic truth. A man never begins by positing himself as an individual of a certain sex: that he is a man is obvious.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“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.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“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.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Blood of Others

“I could not help but comment to my distinguished audience that every question asked about Sartre concerned his work, while all those asked about Beauvoir concerned her personal life.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“the oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“Enforced maternity brings into the world wretched infants, whom their parents will be unable to support and who will become the victims of public care or ‘child martyrs’. It must be pointed out that our society, so concerned to defend the rights of the embryo, shows no interest in the children once they are born; it prosecutes the abortionists instead of undertaking to reform that scandalous institution known as ‘public assistance’; those responsible for entrusting the children to their torturers are allowed to go free; society closes its eyes to the frightful tyranny of brutes in children’s asylums and private foster homes.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“The category of Other is as original as consciousness itself. The duality between Self and Other can be found in the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies; the division did not always fall into the category of the division of the sexes (...) No group ever defines itself as One without immediately setting up the Other opposite itself. It only takes three travelers brought together by chance in the same train compartment for the rest of the travellers to become vaguely hostile 'others'. Village people view anyone not belonging to the village as suspicious 'others'. For the native of a country, inhabitants of other countries are viewed as 'foreigners'; Jews are the 'others' for anti-Semites, blacks for racist Americans, indigenous people for colonists, proletarians for the propertied classes.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex