697 Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

Faith allows an evasion of those difficulties which the atheist confronts honestly. And to crown all, the believer derives a sense of great superiority from this very cowardice itself.

Why shouldn't a mystical theology be possible? 'I want to touch God or become God,' I declared in my journal. All through that year I abandoned myself intermittently to these deliriums.

I'm not jealous of your feelings for people. But I am jealous of people's feelings for you. [...] When you're there, I know quite well our love is the truest; but from afar I find it a burden to see you trailing round in the other hearts.

Jealousy is not contemptible real love has a beak and claws.

There were no scruples, no feelings of respect or loyal affection that would stop us from making up our minds by the pure light of reason - and of our own desires.

To lose confidence in one's body is to lose confidence in oneself.

But I miss you to the point of anguish.

This is what democratic societies understand; they strive to confirm citizens in the feeling of their individual value; the whole ceremonious apparatus of baptism, marriage, and burial is the collectivity's homage to the individual; and the rites of justice seek to manifest society's respect for each of its members considered in his particularity.

Yet, there is hardly a sadder virtue than resignation. It transforms into phantoms and contingent reveries projects which had at the beginning been set up as will and freedom.