Jess > Jess's Quotes

“She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

“I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself”
― Simone de Beauvoir

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

“A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself. ”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

“On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself--on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female — whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.”
― 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

“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.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“What would Prince Charming have for occupation if he had not to awaken the Sleeping beauty?”
― 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

“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.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

“If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it "a discussion”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“‎A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

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

“The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.”
― Simon De Beavoir

“She offered her mouth to him, as if enchanted. A Persian princess, a little Indian, a fox, a morning glory, a lovely wisteria--it always pleased them when you told them they looked like something, like something else.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

“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.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

“Art, literature, and philosophy are attempts to found the world anew on a human freedom: that of the creator; to foster such an aim, one must first unequivocally posit oneself as a freedom. The restrictions that education and custom impose on a woman limit her grasp of the universe...Indeed, for one to become a creator, it is not enough to be cultivated, that is, to make going to shows and meeting people part of one's life; culture must be apprehended through the free movement of a transcendence; the spirit with all its riches must project itself in an empty sky that is its to fill; but if a thousand fine bonds tie it to the earth, its surge is broken. The girl today can certainly go out alone, stroll in the Tuileries; but I have already said how hostile the street is: eyes everywhere, hands waiting: if she wanders absentmindedly, her thoughts elsewhere, if she lights a cigarette in a cafe, if she goes to the cinema alone, an unpleasant incident can quickly occur; she must inspire respect by the way she dresses and behaves: this concern rivets her to the ground and self. "Her wings are clipped." At eighteen, T.E. Lawrence went on a grand tour through France by bicycle; a young girl would never be permitted to take on such an adventure...Yet such experiences have an inestimable impact: this is how an individual in the headiness of freedom and discovery learns to look at the entire world as his fief...[The girl] may feel alone within the world: she never stands up in front of it, unique and sovereign.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“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

“He formed his sentences hesitantly and then threw them at me with such force that I felt as if I were receiving a present each time”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

“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

“It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“Ready-made phrases and the ritual of etiquette were unknown to him; his thoughtfulness was pure improvisation, and it resembled the little inventions affection inspires.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins