697 Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess.

There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.' There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me.

The time that one gains cannot be accumulated in a storehouse; it is contradictory to want to save up existence, which, the fact is, exists only by being spent and there is a good case for showing that airplanes, machines, the telephone, and the radio do not make men of today happier than those of former times.

Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.

Harmony between two individuals is never granted-it has to be conquered indefinitely.

Christianity gave eroticism its savor of sin and legend when it endowed the human female with a soul.

Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one being active and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one.

It is a difficult matter for man to realize the extreme importance of social discriminations which seem outwardly insignificant but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature.

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.