Simone de Beauvoir: Trending quotes (page 4)

“Sex pleasure in woman, as I have said, is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.”

“Be loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody.”

“Women's mutual understanding comes from the fact that they identify themselves with each other; but for the same reason each is against the others.”

“There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.”

“I could see no reason for being sad. It´s just that it makes me unhappy not to feel happy.”

“Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen.”

“Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me”

“Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself - exactly oneself and no one else - and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else.”

“Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.”

“The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.”

“One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.”

“‎A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.”

“Tragedies are all right for a while: you are concerned, you are curious, you feel good. And then it gets repetitive, it doesn't advance, it grows dreadfully boring: it is so very boring, even for me.”

“To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.”

“The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them.”

“People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls.”

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

“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.”

“…but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.”