697 Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

The adventure is which I have shared so passionately is not over – this adventure with its doubt, failure, the dreariness of no progress, then a glimpse of light, a hope, a hypothesis confirmed; and then after weeks and months of anxious perseverance, the intoxication of success.

Let women be provided with living strength of their own. Let them have the means to attack the world and wrest from it their own subsistence, and their dependence will be abolished – that of man also.

Ver cambiar el mundo es a la vez milagroso y desolador.

She had appetites in plenty: she spent all her strength in repressing them and she underwent this denial in anger.

To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it’s hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.

If you haven’t been happy very young, you can still be happy later on, but it’s much harder. You need more luck.

Vengeance is pointless, but certain men do not have a place in the world we sought to construct.

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.

The fact that she accomplishes nothing, that she is nothing, will make her impulses only the more passionate. Empty and unlimited, she seeks from within her nothingness to attain All.