Simone de Beauvoir: Citations en anglais (Page 5)

“… counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.”

“Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.”

“She offered her mouth to him, as if enchanted. A Persian princess, a little Indian, a fox, a morning glory, a lovely wisteria--it always pleased them when you told them they looked like something, like something else.”

“What is an adult? A child blown up by age.”

“It is so tiring to hate someone you love.”

“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. That´s the worst sin of all - the sin of omission.”

“all success cloaks a surrender”

“But women do not say 'We', except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say 'women', and women use the same word in referring to themselves.”

“You have never had any confidence in him. And if he has no confidence in himself it is because he sees himself through your eyes.”

“As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.”

“I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.”

“It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity no to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.”

“The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.”

“I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.”

“I was very fond of Lagneau’s phrase: “I have no comfort but in my absolute despair.”

“She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life.”

“There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.”

“He formed his sentences hesitantly and then threw them at me with such force that I felt as if I were receiving a present each time”

“Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.”