697 Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

The father's life is surrounded by mysterious prestige: the hours he spends in the home, the room where he works, the objects around him, his occupations, his habits, have a sacred character. It is he who feeds the family, is the one in charge and the head. Usually he works outside the home, and it is through him that the household communicates with the rest of the world: he is the embodiment of this adventurous, immense, difficult, and marvelous world; he is transcendence, he is God.

... words have to murder reality before they can hold it captive ...

It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.

Patience is one of those feminine qualities which have their origin in our oppression but should be preserved after our liberation.

Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness.

Between women love is contemplative; caresses are intended less to gain possession of the other than gradually to re-create the self through her; separateness is abolished, there is no struggle, no victory, no defeat; in exact reciprocity each is at once subject and object, sovereign and slave; duality become mutuality.

There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.

Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.

I would stand transfixed before the windows of the confectioners' shops, fascinated by the luminous sparkle of candied fruits, the cloudy lustre of jellies, the kaleidoscope inflorescence of acidulated fruit drops - red, green, orange, violet: I coveted the colours themselves as much as the pleasure they promised me.