Simone de Beauvoir quotes - page 8

We always come back to the same vicious circle - an extreme degree of material or intellectual poverty does away with the means of alleviating it. (Simone de Beauvoir)
Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess.
Simone de Beauvoir
The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution -- not a social or a political revolution -- only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.
Simone de Beauvoir
A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.
Simone de Beauvoir
If you haven't been happy very young, you can still be happy later on, but it's much harder. You need more luck.
Simone de Beauvoir
On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself -- on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life . . .
Simone de Beauvoir
Live with no time out.
Simone de Beauvoir
What did today's sacrifices matter: the Universe lay ahead in the future. What did burnings at the stake and massacres matter? The Universe was somewhere else, always somewhere else! And it isn't anywhere: there are only men, men eternally divided.
Simone de Beauvoir
At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice doesn't pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer.
Simone de Beauvoir
All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception. The existent who is regarded as inessential cannot fail to demand the re-establishment of her sovereignty. Today the combat takes a different shape; instead of wishing to put man in a prison, woman endeavours to escape from one; she no longer seeks to drag him into the realms of immanence but to emerge, herself, into the light of transcendence.
Simone de Beauvoir