697 Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, “I don’t want to be just another blade of grass.

Doomed to procreation and secondary tasks, stripped of her practical importance and her mystical prestige, woman becomes no more than a servant.

Cooking is revolution and creation...

God! when you think of all the things you could do and yet somehow never do! All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn’t come fast enough. Instead of being open, you’re closed up tight. Thats’s the worst sin of all – the sin of omission.

It’s true that what you find in New York is something other than America. Only small towns and small countries are self-satisfied; a real capital goes beyond its borders.

Simonides of Amorgos says, “Women are the greatest evil God ever created: if they sometimes seem useful, they soon change into trouble for their masters.” For Hipponax: “There are but two days in life when your wife brings you joy: her wedding day and her funeral.

To identify Woman with Altruism is to guarantee man absolute rights to her devotion; it is to impose on women a categorical must-be.

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.

Old age is life’s parody.