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Simone de Beauvoir
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5 Simone de Beauvoir
1 reading :::
50 Philosophy Classics: List of Books Covered:
1. Hannah Arendt - The Human Condition (1958)
2. Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics (4th century BC)
3. AJ Ayer - Language
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
938 Simone de Beauvoir
2 Jean Paul Sartre
2 Gillian Flynn
2 Audre Lorde
1:That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.
~ Simone de Beauvoir,#KEYS
2:One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion.
~ Simone de Beauvoir,#KEYS
3:I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself.
~ Simone de Beauvoir,#KEYS
4:I've always been keenly aware of the passing of time. I've always thought that I was old. Even when I was twelve, I thought it was awful to be thirty. I felt that something was lost. At the same time, I was aware of what I could gain, and certain periods of my life have taught me a great deal. But, in spite of everything, I've always been haunted by the passing of time and by the fact that death keeps closing in on us. For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay. It's that, rather than the fact that things disintegrate, that love peters out. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #KEYS
5:The books I liked became a Bible from which I drew advice and support; I copied out long passages from them; I memorized new canticles and new litanies, psalms, proverbs, and prophecies, and I sanctified every incident in my life by the recital of these sacred texts. My emotions, my tears, and my hopes were no less sincere on account of that; the words and the cadences, the lines and the verses were not aids to make believe: but they rescued from silent oblivion all those intimate adventures of the spirit that I couldn't speak to anyone about; they created a kind of communion between myself and those twin souls which existed somewhere out of reach; instead of living out my small private existence, I was participating in a great spiritual epic. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #KEYS
6:reading :::
50 Philosophy Classics: List of Books Covered:
1. Hannah Arendt - The Human Condition (1958)
2. Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics (4th century BC)
3. AJ Ayer - Language, Truth and Logic (1936)
4. Julian Baggini - The Ego Trick (2011)
5. Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
6. Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex (1952)
7. Jeremy Bentham - Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)
8. Henri Bergson - Creative Evolution (1911)
9. David Bohm - Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980)
10. Noam Chomsky - Understanding Power (2002)
11. Cicero - On Duties (44 BC)
12. Confucius - Analects (5th century BC)
13. Rene Descartes - Meditations (1641)
14. Ralph Waldo Emerson - Fate (1860)
15. Epicurus - Letters (3rd century BC)
16. Michel Foucault - The Order of Things (1966)
17. Harry Frankfurt - On Bullshit (2005)
18. Sam Harris - Free Will (2012)
19. GWF Hegel - Phenomenology of Spirit (1803)
20. Martin Heidegger - Being and Time (1927)
21. Heraclitus - Fragments#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Thrown into the atmosphere of action [in 1954], I suddenly understood the kind of neurosis that dominated all my previous work. I had not been able to recognize it before: I was inside. Simone de Beauvoir had guessed these reasons before I did. ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Live with no time-out. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
2:Old age is life's parody. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
3:A menudo curar es mutilar. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
4:Habit has a kind of poetry. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
5:Buying is profound pleasure. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
6:Un enfant, c'est un insurgé. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
7:Aujourd'hui, je n'ai pas vécu ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
8:all success cloaks a surrender ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
9:Buying is a profound pleasure. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
10:immortality is a terrible curse. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
11:Cooking is revolution and creation. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
12:Ženama se ne rađamo, nego postajemo ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
13:Art is an attempt to integrate evil. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
14:I tried to love you less.I couldn't. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
15:It's only arrogance if you're wrong. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
16:On ne naît pas femme: on le devient. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
17:All oppression creates a state of war. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
18:Não é mais amor: sou apenas um hábito. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
19:But I miss you to the point of anguish. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
20:J'accepte la grande aventure d'être moi ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
21:It is so tiring to hate someone you love. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
22:One is not born a woman, one becomes one. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
23:What is an adult? A child blown up by age. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
24:Dans toutes les larmes s'attarde un espoir. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
25:It is impossible to do anything for anyone. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
26:Sclavul care se supune a ales să se supună. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
27:One is not born, but rather becomes a woman. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
28:Kalbimi ince dişli bir testereyle kesiyorlar. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
29:One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
30:The monologue is her form of revenge. FLAUBERT ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
31:Uno no puede responder con nada a la ausencia. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
32:« Exister, c’est oser se jeter dans le monde. » ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
33:I don't want to be just another blade of grass. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
34:Be loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
35:Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
36:La fatalité triomphe dès que l'on croit en elle. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
37:One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
38:Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
39:Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
40:No se modifica la vida sin modificarse a uno mismo ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
41:She was trying to get rid of a religious hangover. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
42:C'est si fatigant de détester quelqu'un qu'on aime. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
43:I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
44:one can never know oneself but only narrate oneself ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
45:To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
46:Writing is a trade ... which is learned by writing. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
47:I love you, with a touch of tragedy and quite madly. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
48:Justice can never be done in the midst of injustice. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
49:The body is the instrument of our hold on the world. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
50:A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
51:Ver cambiar el mundo es a la vez milagroso y desolador ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
52:History took hold of me and never let me go thereafter. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
53:The Koran treats women with the most absolute contempt. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
54:Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
55:Let women be provided with living strength of their own. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
56:The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
57:To be moral is to discover fundamentally ones own being. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
58:I enjoyed my exhaustion, though; I liked overdoing things ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
59:In the embellished woman, Nature was present but captive. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
60:It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
61:I was too enamored of truth ever to mourn lost illusions. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
62:Mi ero voluta senza limiti ed ero informe come l'infinito ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
63:The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
64:Feminism is one way of attacking society as it now exists. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
65:In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
66:To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
67:(...) Se puede querer a dos personas de diferentes modos... ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
68:To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
69:I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
70:Jealousy is not contemptible real love has a beak and claws. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
71:Ça ne rapproche pas, le téléphone, ça confirme les distances. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
72:Jealousy is not contemptible, real love has a beak and claws. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
73:The feminine body is expected to be flesh, but discreetly so; ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
74:Words have to murder reality before they can hold it captive. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
75:Une femme libre est exactement le contraire d'une femme légère ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
76:Humans are the beings whose essence is in not having an essence ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
77:I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
78:Les plus brûlantes images sont froides au prix d'une sensation. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
79:Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
80:She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
81:A foreign country can best be understood through its literature. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
82:All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
83:As we talked in the half-darkness I assuaged an old unhappiness. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
84:Es desde el corazón de mi vida, que yo deseo, prefiero, rechazo. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
85:it is so difficult not to become vain about one's own good luck. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
86:There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
87:Writing ... is a profession that can only be learned by writing. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
88:Death itself does not frighten me; it is the jump I am afraid of. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
89:Mystère pour l'homme, la femme est regardée comme mystère en soi. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
90:No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
91:O homem é livre; mas ele encontra a lei na sua própria liberdade. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
92:Psychoanalysis considers unwarranted issues as accepted as Truth. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
93:Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
94:Une liberté qui ne s'emploie qu'à nier la liberté doit être niée. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
95:Each of us is responsible for everything and to every human being. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
96:My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
97:The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
98:To lose confidence in one's body is to lose confidence in oneself. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
99:To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
100:C'est en risquant sa vie que l'homme s'élève au-dessus de l'animal. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
101:In order to be an artist, one must be deeply rooted in the society. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
102:The prostitute is the sum of all types of feminine slavery at once. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
103:Le plus médiocre des mâles se croit en face des femmes un demi-dieu. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
104:Only a woman can write what it is to feel as a woman, to be a woman. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
105:The human species is forever in a state of change, forever becoming. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
106:Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
107:For the first time I saw her as a dead body under suspended sentence. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
108:You have to start from where you are today and from what can be done. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
109:Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
110:I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
111:I was convinced that I would be, that I was already, one in a million. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
112:Je sais qu'on ne peut jamais se connaître, mais seulement se raconter. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
113:The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
114:The most scandalous aspect of any scandal is that one gets used to it. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
115:The writer can't stop her unconscious from showing up, that's certain. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
116:You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do or don't do. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
117:Anı diye bir şey kalmayacağına göre; bir ana bu kadar önem vermek niye? ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
118:...her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
119:Marriage is a career which brings about more benefits than many others. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
120:On the contrary, shared destitution makes the conjugal link reciprocal. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
121:Algunos días detestaba el mar; era monótono e infinito como la ausencia. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
122:Christian ideology has contributed no little to the oppression of woman. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
123:L'ideologie chrétienne n'a pas peu contribué à l'oppression de la femme. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
124:On ne peut pas mener une vie correcte dans une société qui ne l'est pas. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
125:On ne peut pas mener une vie correcte dans une société qui ne l'est pas? ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
126:Para saber lo que es mío, es necesario saber lo que hago verdaderamente. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
127:Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
128:Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
129:Magari mi troverai ridicola, ma mi disprezzerei se non osassi esserlo mai ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
130:the absolute could be enclosed within the last moments of a dying person. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
131:... tutku bir eksiklik, bir kopuş, yerini dolduracağı bir şey gerektirir. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
132:A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
133:A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
134:La littérature apparaît lorsque quelque chose dans la vie se dérègle [...] ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
135:La tierra está a mi alrededor como una vasta hipótesis que ya no verifico. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
136:Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
137:The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
138:A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
139:Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms... ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
140:Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
141:If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
142:Ningún hombre consentiría en ser mujer, pero todos desean que haya mujeres. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
143:One is not born a woman, one becomes one. —Simone de Beauvoir, A WOMAN’S JOURNAL ~ Joan Anderson, #NFDB
144:One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
145:The American woman's inequality with men is proved by her defiant attitude. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
146:...which we welcomed precisely because it happened to suit our convenience. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
147:And she antagonized me by preferring the force of authority to friendliness. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
148:Me preguntaba como se logra vivir todavia cuando no se espera nada más de sí ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
149:Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
150:Oh, it was easy to be a soldier, it was much less easy to become a man again. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
151:To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
152:No soy una cosa, sino espontaneidad que desea, que ama, que anhela, que actúa. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
153:The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
154:La femme, comme l'homme, est son corps: mais son corps est autre chose qu'elle. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
155:The facts of religion were convincing only to those who were already convinced. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
156:To make something good of the future, you have to look the present in the face. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
157:All around me the world lies like an immense hypothesis that I no longer verify. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
158:Avevo perduto la sicurezza dell'infanzia; in cambio non avevo guadagnato niente. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
159:...el más mediocre de los varones se considera frente a las mujeres un semidiós. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
160:Mystery is never more than a mirage that vanishes as we draw near to look at it. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
161:No descubrí la negra magia de las palabras hasta que me mordieron en el corazón. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
162:Ansızın ağlamak geldi içimden; üzüntüden ölmeyecektim, işin en acı yanı da buydu. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
163:Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
164:You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
165:Das Glück besteht darin, zu leben wie alle Welt und doch wie kein anderer zu sein. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
166:Du jour où il nait, l'homme commence à mourir; c'est la vérité qu'incarne la Mère. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
167:El opresor no sería tan fuerte si no tuviese cómplices entre los propios oprimidos ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
168:I think that Freud understood absolutely nothing about women - as he himself said. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
169:Perché le parole, questa precisione brutale che maltratta le nostre complicazioni? ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
170:When you stubbornly give one man a chance, you arbitrarily deny it to another one. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
171:In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
172:It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
173:I was very fond of Lagneau’s phrase: “I have no comfort but in my absolute despair. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
174:On ne na|"t pas femme: on le devient. One is not born a woman: one becomes a woman. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
175:At the moment of their emancipation, women have a need to write their own histories. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
176:...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
177:From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
178:insanoğlunun mutsuzluğu tek bir şeyden geliyor:bir odada oturup kalmayı bilmemekten! ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
179:Male beauty is a sign of transcendence, that of woman has the passivity of immanence ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
180:A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
181:Anyway I know only too well that all life is nothing but a brief reprieve from death. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
182:Harmony between two individuals is never granted-it has to be conquered indefinitely. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
183:It is doubtless impossible to approach any human problems with a mind free from bias. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
184:No veía ninguna razón para reconocerle a mi compañero derechos que él no me concedía. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
185:Peut-être vas-tu me trouver ridicule, mais je me mépriserais de n'oser l'être jamais. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
186:There was still a question in her eyes-- one that she did not like to put into words. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
187:You said something very true the other day: that for us, nudity begins with the face. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
188:Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
189:If I were the earth it would disgust me, all this vermin on my back, I’d shake it off. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
190:La bella storia che era la mia vita diventava falsa a mano a mano che me la raccontavo ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
191:La tristeza puede llorarse. Pero la impaciencia de la alegría no es fácil de conjurar. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
192:Les livres que j'aimais devinrent une Bible où je puisais des conseils et des secours. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
193:En todo acto sexual esta implicado lo Otro, y su rostro más habitual es el de la mujer. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
194:I would have to have a bit of heroism and get out of myself. But I love myself so much! ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
195:...modern woman is everywhere permitted to regard her body as capital for exploitation. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
196:She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
197:Y, ¿ante los ojos de quién mi conducta es fuga, si para mí es libre elección de un fin? ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
198:Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
199:Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
200:If you point out that they’re walking in shit they scream it’s you that have dirty feet. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
201:People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
202:there was also a celebrated official sculptor whose works disfigured the whole of Paris, ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
203:History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
204:If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it "a discussion ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
205:There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
206:Entre deux individus, l'harmonie n'est jamais donnée, elle doit indéfiniment se conquérir. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
207:I could see no reason for being sad. It´s just that it makes me unhappy not to feel happy. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
208:I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
209:In truth we need to change the society itself, men as well as women, to change everything. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
210:What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
211:What would Prince Charming have for occupation if he had not to awaken the Sleeping beauty? ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
212:But it is impossible for anyone to say ‘I am sacrificing myself’ without feeling bitterness. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
213:Dacă trăieşti destul de mult, vei vedea că fiecare victorie se transformă într-o înfrângere. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
214:Girls are weighed down by restrictions, boys with demands - two equally harmful disciplines. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
215:If women really did have complete equality with men, society would be completely overturned. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
216:Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
217:Recordemos que el hombre es trascendencia; lo que reclama, no lo reclama sino para superarlo. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
218:Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
219:We had taken to living out of step. I resented his gaiety now that I had become low-spirited. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
220:A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
221:It is dreadful to think that behind me my own past is no longer anything but shifting darkness. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
222:Picasso never thought of himself as avant-garde. I just find it a bad way to think of yourself. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
223:Vengeance is pointless, but certain men do not have a place in the world we sought to construct ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
224:Cada sexo cree justificarse tomando la ofensiva: pero los entuertos de uno no absuelven al otro. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
225:Literature in France seems to be undergoing a crisis now, and nothing comes immediately to mind. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
226:The arrogance of some Christians would close heaven to them if, to their misfortune, it existed. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
227:Vengeance is pointless, but certain men did not have a place in the world we sought to construct ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
228:Es en el objeto finito que crea, donde el hombre, encontrará un reflejo fijo de su trascendencia. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
229:Estaba dispuesta a negar el espacio y el tiempo antes de admitir que el amor puede no ser eterno. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
230:When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
231:The emancipation of women must be the work of women themselves, independent of the class struggle. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
232:I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
233:There are so many problems. Women can go to work on these as well without giving up their feminism. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
234:They don't like being seen through: as for me I'm straight I don't join their act I tear masks off. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
235:We belong to this earth. Now I can see the truth ... I love you on this earth of ours. Love me, do! ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
236:The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
237:Y con la amistad pasa como con el amor físico: para que sea auténtica tiene que ser ante todo libre. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
238:Christianity gave eroticism its savor of sin and legend when it endowed the human female with a soul. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
239:Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
240:The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
241:... to adapt one's outlook to another person's salvation is the surest and quickest way of losing him. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
242:We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
243:When Simone de Beauvoir said, “One is not born a woman—one becomes one,” she didn’t know the half of it. In ~ Caitlin Moran, #NFDB
244:El fin no es fin sino al término del camino; desde que es logrado, se vuelve un nuevo punto de partida. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
245:She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
246:: woman is an eminently poetic reality since man projects onto her everything he is not resolved to be. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
247:At bottom, antipsychiatry is still psychiatry. And it doesn't really address itself to women's problems. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
248:I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
249:The goal which my freedom aims at is conquering existence across the always inadequate density of being. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
250:I am not a great French woman. George Sand, Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir are great French women. ~ Juliette Binoche, #NFDB
251:I never thought of myself as being in the avant-garde. I said what I had to say, as I was able to say it. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
252:Nul n'est plus arrogant à l'égard des femmes, agressif ou dédaigneux, qu'un homme inquiet de sa virilité. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
253:Cada hombre decide el lugar que ocupa en el mundo; pero es necesario que ocupe uno, jamás puede retirarse. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
254:If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
255:I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
256:Les pensées vont et viennent à leur guise dans notre tête, on ne fait pas exprès de croire ce qu'on croit. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
257:There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
258:The relation of woman to husband, of daughter to father, of sister to brother, is a relation of vassalage. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
259:The Social Security's medical consultants support the interest not of the victims but of the organization. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
260:Time vanishes behind those who leave this world, and the older I get the more my past years draw together. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
261:To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
262:As long as the family and the myth of the family ... have not been destroyed, women will still be oppressed. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
263:It must feel wonderfully strange when, like Manette, one stands there, the only witness to a vanished world. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
264:Ser libre es lanzarse en el mundo sin cálculo, sin apuestas, es definir uno mismo toda apuesta, toda medida. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
265:There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
266:Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
267:But I was brought up on convent morals and paternal nationalism, I was getting bogged down in contradictions. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
268:Ik koos het bestaan niet, maar ik besta. Een ongerijmdheid die verantwoordelijk voor zichzelf is, dat ben ik. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
269:Ik kóós het bestaan niet, maar ik besta. Een ongerijmdheid die verantwoordelijk voor zichzelf is, dát ben ik. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
270:One of the benefits that oppression secures for the oppressor is that the humblest among them feels superior. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
271:The relation of woman to husband, of of daughter to father, of sister to brother, is a relation of vassalage. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
272:Une habitude c'est presque une compagnie, dans la mesure où une compagnie n'est bien souvent qu'une habitude. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
273:Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consultation for death. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
274:Am învățat, de asemenea, că pentru a pătrunde taina lucrurilor trebuie, înainte de toate, să te dăruiești lor. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
275:But I know my only defense is to answer, “I think it because it is true,” thereby eliminating my subjectivity; ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
276:That's what I consider true generosity. You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
277:That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
278:That’s what’s so wonderful about you, you’re so self-sufficient that I feel that you’ve created your own self. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
279:That the child is the supreme aim of woman is a statement having precisely the value of an advertising slogan. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
280:Pero nuestros actos no esperan ser llamados; saltan hacia un porvenir que no está prefigurado en ninguna parte. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
281:She [the female] appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex - absolute sex, no less. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
282: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, #NFDB
283:It is easier to put people in chains than to remove them if the chains bring prestige, said George Bernard Shaw. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
284:Man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
285:The goal toward which I surpass myself must appear to me as a point of departure toward a new act of surpassing. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
286:To give space when what one most yearns for is closeness, that is both the great test and great tragedy of love. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
287:Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
288:I pensieri vanno e vengono a loro piacere, nella nostra testa. Non lo si fa apposta a credere a ciò che si crede. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
289:That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.
~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
290:To want to prohibit a man from error is to forbid him to fulfill his own existence, it is to deprive him of life. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
291:Given masculine norms, it is clear that women are more likely to be considered crazy - I'm not saying to be crazy. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
292:No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
293:She had appetites in plenty: she spent all her strength in repressing them and she underwent this denial in anger. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
294:Taking without being taken in the anguish of becoming prey is the dangerous game of adolescent feminine sexuality. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
295:D'improvviso, l'avvenire esisteva; mi avrebbe cambiata in un'altra che avrebbe detto io e non sarebbe più stata me. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
296:Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
297:A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
298:For years I thought my work still lay ahead, and now I find it is behind me: there was no moment when it took place. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
299:Görüyorsunuz ya, ne zaman Tanrı'yı aramaya kalksam, bir erkekle
karşılaşıyorum; hangi dine yöneleceğimi şaşırdım. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
300:Dans la femme parée, la Nature est présente, mais captive, modelée par une volonté humaine selon le désir de l'homme. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
301:That a whole part of the middle class detests me... is utterly normal. I would be troubled if the contrary were true. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
302:Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
303:The nearer I come to the end of my days, the more I am enabled to see that strange thing, a life, and to see it whole. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
304:There is a kind of universality in the human condition, masculine or feminine. That's one thing I continue to believe. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
305:When an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
306:En la Naturaleza, nada está nunca completamente claro: los tipos, macho y hembra, no siempre se distinguen con nitidez. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
307:I was too much of an extremist to be able to live under the eye of God and at the same time say both yes and no to life ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
308:This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
309:One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
310:Todas las mujeres se creen diferentes; todas piensan que ciertas cosas no pueden sucederles, y todas ellas se equivocan. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
311:Gün doğarken ancak dört saatlik bir ömrü kalmıştı. Dirilttim onu!" Kendisine "Ne için?" diye sormak cesaretini bulamadım. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
312:Le pays latins, comme les pays d'Orient, oppriment la femme par le rigueur des moeurs encore plus que par celle des lois. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
313:To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
314:By her eyes she clung to the world, as by her nails she clung to the sheet, so that she might not be engulfed. ‘Live! Live! ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
315:Each person has his or her own very particular history and after all, the unconscious is the most secret part of ourselves. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
316:Man may reproach women for their dissimulation, but his complacency must be great indeed for him to be so constantly duped. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
317:Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
318:C'est par le travail que la femme a conquis sa dignité d'être humain; mais ce fut une conquête singulièrement dure et lente. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
319:Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
320:One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion.
~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
321:The sin of smiling whilst Louise was weeping, the sin of shedding my own tears and not hers. The sin of being another being. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
322:Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
323:It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
324:L'homme a réussi à asservir la femme : mais dans cette mesure il l'a dépouillée de ce qui en rendait la possession désirable. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
325:One can not start by saying that our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends upon us to give it importance. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
326:The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady, yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
327:There was a French activist and writer, Simone de Beauvoir, who said, 'You are not born woman. You become one' ... Words I live by. ~ Bruce Jenner, #NFDB
328:This is certainly a very tricky point: How to ally yourself to other leftist forces without losing your feminist specificity. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
329:You can't address yourself to women by speaking a language which no average woman will understand. In my opinion, it's wrong. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
330:Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
331:I feel something troubling inside of me which scares me, an exhausting violence. But I accept the great adventure of being me. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
332:Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word. Machines won't change human nature. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
333:Sorumlusu olmadığım halde, benim olan, hiçbir zaman da bağışlatamayacağım bir günahın, umutsuzluk içinde, cezasını çekiyordum. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
334:there is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
335:Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
336:It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator burdened with all the contradictions in the world. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
337:For a woman to be taken as seriously as a man she must be three times as effective. Happily, this is not difficult.--Simone de Beauvoir ~ Gale Martin, #NFDB
338:How could women ever have had genius when all possibility of accomplishing a work of genius - or just a work - was refused them? ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
339:It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
340:Literature took the place in my life that had once been occupied by religion: it absorbed me entirely, and transfigured my life. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
341: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
342: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
343:En general la soledad no me aterra y en pequeñas dosis hasta me distiende: las presencias que me son caras me fatigan el corazón. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
344:I went to get a detective story. You have to kill time. But time will kill me too - and there´s the true, preestablished balance. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
345: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
346:If I were to share Jaques' existence I would find it hard to hold my own against him, for already I found his nihilism contagious. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
347:I think it's wrong to write in a totally esoteric language when you want to talk about things which interest a multitude of women. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
348:Je sens en moi quelque chose de trouble qui me fait peur, une violence qui m’épuise. Mais j’accepte la grande aventure d’être moi. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
349:E pesando na terra todo o meu peso imóvel. Tu morres. Outros agonizam lentamente, corpos cheios de golpes, a pele colada aos ossos. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
350:Every time a man dies, a child dies too, and an adolescent and a young man as well; everyone weeps for the one who was dear to him. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
351: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 ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
352:I discovered feminism around 1970-72-precisely the time when feminism began to exist in France. Before that, there was no feminism. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
353:If the writer is a woman, feminist or not, it will give the language something that it would not have if it had been used by a man. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
354:I’m not tragic these days, I don’t weep, but I feel alone, bewildered, far from you, far from everything — nothing has any meaning. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
355:It must be added that the men who most respect embryonic life are the same ones who do not hesitate to send adults to death in war. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
356:Patience is one of those feminine qualities which have their origin in our oppression but should be preserved after our liberation. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
357:(…) symbolism did not fall out of heaven or rise out of subterranean depths: it was elaborated like language, by the human reality… ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
358:Women aren't more easily swayed by fascism than men, but I believe that their situation makes them in effect more slavish than men. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
359:Bourgeoises, elles sont solidaires des bourgeois et non des femmes prolétaires ; blanches des hommes blancs et non des femmes noires ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
360:Choice springs from the totality of the person. Thus, to study, to analyze what a person is, does not eliminate the idea of freedom. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
361:I would certainly like to see some young women take up psychoanalysis seriously and reconstruct it from an absolutely new viewpoint. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
362:One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
363:Quand elles [les femmes] sont intervenues dans le cours du monde, c'est en accord avec les hommes, dans des perspectives masculines. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
364:She wants to believe there is a micro way into the macro—that we can Sheryl Sandberg our way to a Simone de Beauvoir–worthy society. ~ Anand Giridharadas, #NFDB
365:The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
366:To identify Woman with Altruism is to guarantee man absolute rights to her devotion; it is to impose on women a categorical must-be. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
367:But I’ve been reading A Very Easy Death, about Simone de Beauvoir’s mother dying of cancer – it’s just brilliant. It really helped me.’ She ~ Helen Garner, #NFDB
368:If you are truly on the left, if you reject ideas of power and hierarchy, what you want is equality. Otherwise, it won't work at all. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
369:Não há salvação. Nem mesmo a embriagez do desespero e a resolução cega, porque tu estás aí, nessa cama, na luz selvagem da tua morte. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
370:One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
371:The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
372: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
373:Já se passaram três anos? [...] A rapidez com que os anos se passaram era angustiante. Quantas vezes ainda teria três anos para viver? ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
374:...le parole fissano la verità solo dopo averla assassinata; lasciano sfuggire ciò che v'è in essa di più importante: la sua presenza. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
375:When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
376:A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into? ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
377:Ce ne sont pas les individus qui sont responsables de l'échec du mariage: c'est l'institution elle-même qui est originellement pervertie ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
378:Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
379:Maar er bestaat een te groot misverstand tussen ons. Je hebt nooit getracht mijn leven te delen, je hebt me enkel voor jezelf liefgehad. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
380:One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
381:One understands now the drama that rends the adolescent girl at puberty: she cannot become “a grown-up” without accepting her femininity ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
382:Comprendí en seguida que formaban parte de los placeres de los viajes las amistades sin futuro y el leve desgarramieto de las despedidas. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
383:[...]maintenant je n'ai plus de regrets,parce que les choses qui n'existent pas pour moi,il me semble qu'elles n'existent absolument pas. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
384:The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
385:When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...]. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
386:Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
387:Je suis peut-être mesquine mais je voudrais qu'ils meurent tous pour que s'anéantisse la lamentable image qu'ils se font à présent de moi. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
388:Love is then renunciation of all possession, of all confusion. One renounces being in order that there may be that being which one is not. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
389:Même les manifestations et les initiatives féminines n'ont pris de valeur que lorsqu'une décision masculine les a efficacement prolongées. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
390:Yaşamaya sıkı sıkı sarılmışsanız sizce ister gökyüzünde ister yeryüzünde olsun, ölümsüzlük ölümün acısını size unutturamaz, sizi avutamaz. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
391:I could easily understand why Lambert was bored with this peace which gave us back our lives without giving us back our reasons for living. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
392:Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
393:The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
394:He would talk and talk and talk; the twilight would fill with cigarette smoke and shimmering words would tremble in the blue coils of air... ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
395:Life is about more than just maintaining oneself, it is about extending oneself. Otherwise living is only not dying - SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR (1908-1986) ~ Lin Pardey, #NFDB
396:Tel était le sens de ma vocation ~ Simone de Beauvoiradulte, je reprendrais en main mon enfance et j'en ferais un chef-d'oeuvre sans faille. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
397:Un des problèmes essentiels qui se posent à propos de la femme, c'est la conciliation de son rôle reproducteur et de son travail producteur. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
398:As soon as a woman re- fuses to be perfectly happy doing housework eight hours a day, society has a tendency to want to do a lobotomy on her. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
399:I am not at all for a feminism which is entirely separatist, which would say, "this domain is purely for women." I don't believe that at all. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
400:The tie that binds her to her oppressors is unlike any other. The division of the sexes is a biological given, not a moment in human history. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
401:Dwelling-place and food are useful for life but give it no significance: the immediate goals of the housekeeper are only means, not true ends. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
402:He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies! ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
403:Yet a revolution cannot begin until the diffuse, private indignation of individuals coalesces into a common cause. Beauvoir not only marshaled ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
404:Marriage is traditionally the destiny offered to women by society. Most women are married or have been, or plan to be or suffer from not being. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
405:Old age is better for women than for men. First of all, they have less far to fall, since their lives are more mediocre than those of most men. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
406:One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
407:Doomed to procreation and secondary tasks, stripped of her practical importance and her mystical prestige, woman becomes no more than a servant. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
408:I’ve done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I’ve been swindled all the same because it’s never anything more. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
409:Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
410:[T]here is no way to measure the happiness of others, and it is always easy to call a situation that one would like to impose on others happy... ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
411:I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
412:Retirement revives the sorrow of parting, the feeling of abandonment, solitude and uselessness that is caused by the loss of some beloved person. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
413:Avevo torto di pretendere che la vita si conformasse a un ideale stabilito in anticipo; stava a me mostrami all'altezza di ciò ch'essa mi portava. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
414: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, #NFDB
415:A man of the right doesn't write in the same way as a man of the left, you can see that right away, or a woman of the right or a woman of the left. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
416:But the answer is obvious: it is easy to believe one is sovereign when alone, to believe oneself strong when carefully refusing to bear any burden. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
417:By the time humankind reaches the stage of writing its mythology and laws, patriarchy is definitively established: it is males who write the codes. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
418: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
419:«No hay que creer en el Príncipe Azul. Los hombres no son más que unos pobres seres.» No parecerían enanos si no se les pidiera que fuesen gigantes. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
420:A writer is hoisted up onto a pedestal only to scrutinize him more closely and conclude that it was a mistake to put him up there in the first place. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
421:If woman discovers herself as the inessential and never turns into the essential, it is because she does not bring about this transformation herself. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
422:Lynching is an absolute evil; it represents the survival of an obsolete civilization, the perpetuation of a struggle of races which has to disappear; ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
423:Many things would be changed for Americans if they would only admit that there is ill-luck in this world and that misfortune is not a priori a crime. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
424:Sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
425:Sex pleasure in women is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
426:El hombre se eleva sobre el animal al arriesgar la vida, no al darla, por eso la humanidad acuerda superioridad al sexo que mata y no al que engendra. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
427:I think there is a great tendency toward autobiography among women today. It is perhaps facile - and I say that even though I have written one myself. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
428:Life can't be bought piecemeal; it has to be purchased in bulk- all or nothing. Only there isn't time enough for everything, that's the tragedy of it. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
429:The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or castle; it stands for permanence and separation from the world. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
430:Hay que esperar siempre que el azúcar se disuelva, que el recuerdo se esfume, que la herida cicatrice, que el sol se oculte, que el fastidio se disipe. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
431:If the unconscious must express itself it will do so through the work that you do consciously or subconsciously, with words, with what you have to say. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
432:no exato momento, num outro jardim, completamente diferente, exatamente igual, alguém pronuncia essas palavras e o mesmo sorriso repousa em outro rosto ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
433:For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
434:If the "question of women" is so trivial, it is because masculine arrogance turned it into a "quarrel"; when people quarrel, they no longer reason well. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
435:it is true that nothing is gained without something being lost: everyone knows that in fulfilling oneself one necessarily sacrifices some possibilities. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
436:Mis relaciones con las cosas no están dadas, no son fijas; las creo minuto a minuto, algunas mueren, algunas nacen y otras resucitan. Sin cesar cambian. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
437:But what does the word insist mean after a whole life of love and understanding? I have never asked anything for myself that I did not also wish for him. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
438:Have you ever felt in your inmost being, the conscience of others?' again she was trembling, the words were not releasing her. 'It's intolerable you know ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
439:Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one being active and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
440:If she could inherit, she would thus wrongly transmit her paternal family’s riches to that of her husband: she is carefully excluded from the succession. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
441:Ja, wenn ich Ihre Energie hätte...' Mit Energie hat das gar nichts zu tun, dachte ich beim Aussteigen. Ich könnte einfach nicht leben, ohne zu Schreiben. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
442:Je me passerais bien, comme vous pouvez le penser, de toutes ces distractions; c'est si assommant de s'amuser quand on n'en sent à aucun degré le besoin. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
443:He draws the motivations of his moral attitude from within the character which he has given himself and from within the universe which is its correlative. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
444:Je suis un intellectuel. Ça m'agace qu'on fasse de ce mot une insulte : les gens ont l'air de croire que le vide de leur cerveau leur meuble les couilles. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
445:Kadını götürüp mutfağa ya da
süslenme odasına kapatıyor, sonra da ufkunun darlığına şaşıyoruz; kanatlarını kesiyoruz, sonra, uçamıyor diye yakınıyoruz. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
446:Las mujeres no son solidarias como sexo: ante todo están ligadas a su clase; los intereses de las burguesas y los de las mujeres proletarias no coinciden. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
447: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
448:I think that The Second Sex will seem an old, dated book, after a while. But nonetheless, a book which will have made its contribution. At least, I hope so. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
449:Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
450:Das schimmste aber, wenn man ein Gefängnis aus unsichtbaren Mauern bewohnt, ist, dass man sich der Schranken nicht bewusst wird, die den Horizont versperren. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
451:Deplangeam adultii ale caror saptamani serbede erau vag animate de niste duminici fade. Mi se parea ingrozitor sa traiesti fara sa astepti nimic de la viata. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
452:El otro, como otro, reviste fácilmente ese carácter maravilloso e inaccesible, pero él a solas consigo, experimenta para sí ese vacío que está en su corazón. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
453:She compensated for this sense of inferiority by making fun of everything. I did not notice it then, but she never made fun of my faults, only of my virtues; ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
454: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
455:Wenigstens eine kleine Weile lang mußte ich, jedem Anspruch entrückt, in Frieden mit mir selbst sprechen können, ohne daß irgendjemand mich dabei unterbrach. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
456:Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
457:Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you've lost that, you've lost everything. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
458:He forgets that every goal is at the same time a point of departure and that human freedom is the ultimate, the unique end to which man should destine himself. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
459:I like everyone who tries to show that madness is, in large part, conditioned by society and particularly by the family, and therefore, strongly affects women. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
460:My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
461:Saint Thomas declared that woman was an “inessential” being, which, from a masculine point of view, is a way of positing the accidental character of sexuality. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
462: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
463:I had to call the past to life, and illuminate every corner of the five continents, descend to the centre of the earth and make the circuit of the moon and stars ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
464:La fécondité absurde de la femme l'empêchait de participer activement à l'accroissement de ces ressources tandis qu'elle créait indéfiniment de nouveaux besoins. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
465:A man would never set out to write a book on the peculiar
situation of the human male. But if I wish to define myself, I
must first of all say: T am a woman ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
466:Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
467:psychoanalysts in particular define man as a human being and woman as a female: every time she acts like a human being, the woman is said to be imitating the male. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
468:There were no scruples, no feelings of respect or loyal affection that would stop us from making up our minds by the pure light of reason - and of our own desires. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
469:The world brings itself into being before my eyes in an everlasting present: I grow used to its different aspects so quickly that it does not seem to me to change. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
470:And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
471:Si l'on vit assez longtemps, on voit que toute victoire se change un jour en de faite. If you live long enough, you'll find that every victory turns into a defeat. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
472:Why does one exist? That's not my problem. One does exist. The thing to do is to take no notice but go at it on the run and to keep on going right on until you die. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
473:it is not the inferiority of women that has caused their historical insignificance; it is rather their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
474:Simone de Beauvoir’s words echo in my head: “It is in the recognition of the genuine conditions of our lives that we gain the strength to act and our motivation for change. ~ Audre Lorde, #NFDB
475:Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside --from others. We do not accept it willingly. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
476:Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
477:Resistance put up by the old capitalist paternalism prevents this equality from being concretely achieved: it will be achieved the day this resistance is broken down. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
478:What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
479:When Goya was 80 he drew an ancient man propped on two sticks, with a great mass of white hair and beard all over his face, and the inscription, "I am still learning." ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
480:All the idols made by man, however terrifying they may be, are in point of fact subordinate to him, and that is why he will always have it in his power to destroy them. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
481:I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
482:Ah, if only there were two of me, she thought, one who spoke and the other who listened, one who lived and one who watched, how I would love myself! I would envy no one. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
483: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
484:In all my games, my day-dreams, and my plans for the future I never changed myself into a man; all my imagination was devoted to the fulfilment of my destiny as a woman. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
485:It's frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself. It seems unfair. You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do --or don't do. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
486:Ready-made phrases and the ritual of etiquette were unknown to him; his thoughtfulness was pure improvisation, and it resembled the little inventions affection inspires. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
487: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
488: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
489:Hay que añadir que los hombres más respetuosos con al vida embrionaria son también lo que más prontos se muestran cuando se trata de condenar adultos a una muerte militar. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
490:Suddenly I was struck motionless: I was living through the first chapter of a novel in which I was the heroine; she was still almost a child, but we, too, were growing up. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
491:We can hope to grasp the significance of sexuality only by studying it in its concrete manifestations; and then perhaps the meaning of the word female will stand revealed. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
492:I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself.
~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
493:L'action des femmes n'a jamais été qu'une agitation symbolique; elles n'ont gagné que ce que les hommes ont bien voulu leur concéder; elles n'ont rien pris: elles ont reçu. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
494:Mi acción no es para otro sino lo que él mismo la hace ser: ¿cómo puedo, pues, saber de antemano lo que hago?; y si no lo sé, ¿cómo puedo proponerme obrar por la humanidad? ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
495:Women's actions have never been more than symbolic agitation; they have one only what men have been willing to concede to them; they have taken nothing; they have received. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
496:Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects. pg. xxxiii ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
497:Les femmes ne sont pas solidaires en tant que sexe : elles sont d’abord liées à leur classe. Les intérêts des bourgeoises et ceux des femmes prolétaires ne se recoupent pas. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
498:The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
499:They use the pretext of avoiding war, to make you swallow any kind of peace, said Paul. They use the pretext of a revolution to involve us in any kind of war, said Jardinet. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
500:É prático, quando ela se ausenta, as pessoas pensam que está procurando outro slogan. Um cigarro na mão esquerda, a mão direita aberta e levantada para prevenir interrupções. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
501:Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
502:One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, "I will always be here." ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
503:Not only do we assert that the existentialist doctrine permits the elaboration of an ethics, but it even appears to us as the only philosophy in which an ethics has its place. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
504:That is what chills your spine when you read an account of a suicide: not the frail corpse hanging from the window bars but what happened inside that heart immediately before. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
505:Yet, there is hardly a sadder virtue than resignation. It transforms into phantoms and contingent reveries projects which had at the beginning been set up as will and freedom. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
506:Législateurs, prêtres, philosophes, écrivains, savants se sont acharnés à démontrer que la condition subordonnée de la femme était voulue dans le ciel et profitable à la terre. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
507:Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
508:I'm not against mothers. I am against the ideology which expects every woman to have children, and I'm against the circumstances under which mothers have to have their children. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
509:To paint, to write, to engage in politics—these are not merely ‘sublimations’; here we have aims that are willed for their own sakes. To deny it is to falsify all human history. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
510:In the afternoons I would sit out on the balcony outside the dining-room; there, level with the tops of the trees that shaded the boulevard Raspail, I would watch the passers-by. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
511:É completamente estúpido escrever cartas de amor, não pode ser transcrito através de uma simples carta, mas o que fazer quando este horrível oceano nos separa do homem que amamos? ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
512:¡Basta!' Seguí. Quería que se fuera; verdaderamente lo quería, era sincera. Sincera porque no creí que lo hiciera. Era como un espantoso psicodrama en el que uno juega a la verdad. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
513:It must be said in addition that the men with the most scrupulous respect for embryonic life are also those who are most zealous when it comes to condemning adults to death in war. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
514:Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear, without having so much as a smile for the young future. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
515:With regard to us, she often displayed a cruel unkindness that was more thoughtless than sadistic: her desire was not to cause us unhappiness but to prove her own power to herself. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
516:Ya había sentido eso antes, como esta noche, que su ser se disolvía en provecho de seres inaccesibles, pero nunca había visto con una lucidez tan perfecta su propio aniquilamiento. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
517:It's so easy to be mistaken about the future. Sometimes there are avant-gardes which believe themselves to be the avant-garde and which later find themselves to be absolutely dated. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
518:The individuals who seem to us most outstanding, who are honored with the name of genius, are those who have proposed to enact the fate of all humanity in their personal existences. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
519:I could not help but comment to my distinguished audience that every question asked about Sartre concerned his work, while all those asked about Beauvoir concerned her personal life. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
520: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
521:bstract gatherings such as conferences- do not use "we"; men say "women," and women adopt this word to refer to themselves; but they do not posit themselves authentically as Subjects. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
522: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
523:Always the same faces, the same surroundings, the same conversations, the same problems. The more it changes, the more it repeats itself. In the end, you feel as if you’re dying alive. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
524:Faith allows an evasion of those difficulties which the atheist confronts honestly. And to crown all, the believer derives a sense of great superiority from this very cowardice itself. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
525:I didn't know the first thing about the people around me, but that didn't matter: I was in a new world; and I had the feelings that at last I had put my finger on the secret of freedom. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
526:Why shouldn't a mystical theology be possible? 'I want to touch God or become God,' I declared in my journal. All through that year I abandoned myself intermittently to these deliriums. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
527:To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simpily an all-pervasive system. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
528:The moment anyone begins making calculations or comparisons, they cease to live for the moment: the present becomes a mere pointer to the future, and all sorts of questions tend to arise. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
529:The fact is that a true human privilege is based upon the anatomical privilege only in virtue of the total situation. Psychoanalysis can establish its truths only in the historical context. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
530:The man most sympathetic to women never knows her concrete situation fully. So there is no good reason to believe men when they try to defend privileges whose scope they cannot even fathom. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
531:There was a time, in the nineteenth century, for example, when women spoke mostly about the house, children, birth, and so forth, because it was their domain. That's changing a little, now. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
532:Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
533:Sí yo mismo no fuera sino una cosa, nada en efecto me concerniría; si me encierro en mí mismo, el otro está también cerrado para mí; la existencia inerte de las cosas es separación y soledad. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
534:The means, it is said, will be justified by the end; but it is the means which define it, and if it is contradicted at the moment that it is set up, the whole enterprise sinks into absurdity. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
535:There is no such thing as maternal "instinct": the word does not in any case apply to the human species. The mother's attitude is defined by her total situation and by the way she accepts it. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
536:To create a language all of a piece which would be a women's language, that I find quite insane. There does not exist a mathematics which is only a women's mathematics, or a feminine science. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
537:In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
538: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
539:Mie imi trebuie o viata devotata. Am nevoie sa actionez, sa ma agit, sa creez; am nevoie de un tel pe care sa-l ating, de greutati de invins, de o opera de realizat. Nu sunt facuta pentru lux. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
540: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
541: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 not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
542:What do you believe in ?"
"People's sufferings, and the fact that it is abominable. One should do everything to abolish it. To tell you the truth, nothing else seems to me of any importance. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
543:En tant qu'il existe pour soi l'enfant ne saurait se saisir comme sexuellement différencié. (...) C'est à travers les yeux, les mains, non par les paties sexuelles qu'ils appréhendent l'univers. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
544:Surviving one’s own life, living on the other side of it like a spectator, is quite comfortable after all. You no longer expect anything, no longer fear anything, and every hour is like a memory. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
545:The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength - each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
546:All those minds that are interested in finding out the truth communicate with each other across the distances of space and time. I, too, was taking part in the effort which humanity makes to know. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
547:In our opinion, there is no public good other than one that assures the citizens’ private good; we judge institutions from the point of view of the concrete opportunities they give to individuals. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
548:La raison profonde qui à l'origine de l'histoire voue la femme au travail domestique et lui interdit de prendre part à la construction du monde, c'est son asservissement à la fonction génératrice. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
549:Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms. For each of them, love would be the revelation of the self through the gift of the self and the enrichment of the universe. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
550:When he describes woman, each writer discloses his general ethics and the special idea he has of himself; and in her he often betrays also the gap between his world view and his egotistical dreams. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
551:Le nihiliste a raison de penser que le monde no possède aucune justification et que lui-même n'est rien; mais il oublie qu'il lui appartient de justifier le monde et de se faire exister valablement. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
552:Poder conversar é uma grande sorte, disse ela. É compreensível que, nos casais que não sabem se aproveitar das palavras, os mal-entendidos formem bolas de neve e acabem por estragar tudo entre eles. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
553:If I were proud of anything in my life, it would be of our love. I feel we have to tell to each other as many things as we can, so we are not only lovers, but the closest of friends at the same time. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
554:The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
555: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
556:Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
557: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
558:Old age was growing inside me. It kept catching my eye from the depths of the mirror. I was paralyzed sometimes as I saw it making its way toward me so steadily when nothing inside me was ready for it. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
559:Un amor auténtico debería de asumir la contingencia del otro, es decir, sus carencias, sus límites y su gratuidad originaria; así no pretendería ser una salvación sino una relación entre seres humanos. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
560:Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
561:Women- except in abstract gatherings such as conferences- do not use "we"; men say "women," and women adopt this word to refer to themselves; but they do not posit themselves authentically as Subjects. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
562:One can not, without absurdity, indefinitely sacrifice each generation to the following one; human history would then be only an endless succession of negations which would never return to the positive. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
563:…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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
564:La Malédiction qui pèse sur le mariage, c’est que trop souvent les individus s’y rejoignent dans leur faiblesse, non dans leur force, c’est que chacun demande à l’autre au lieu de se plaire à lui donner. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
565:Un giorno un uomo mi ha detto: esiste un solo bene, agire secondo la propria coscienza. Credo che avesse ragione, e che tutti gli sforzi che abbiamo la pretesa di fare per gli altri non servano a niente. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
566:(About Sartre...)
His death does not separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are. It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
567:However gifted an individual is at the outset, if his or her talents cannot be developed because of his or her social condition, because of the surrounding circumstances, these talents will be still-born. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
568:Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise." (p. 248) ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
569: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
570:Trudging alone along that black road, sometimes in the teeth of wind and rain, and watching the white distant gleam of convolvulus through the park railings, gave me an exhilarating sensation of adventure. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
571:Society turns away from the aged worker as though he belonged to another species. That is why the whole question is buried in a conspiracy of silence. Old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
572:The fear of death never left me; I couldn't get used to the thought; I would still sometimes shake and weep with terror. By contrast, the fact of existence here and now sometimes took on a glorious splendour. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
573:There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.' There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
574:one of the problems he will seek to solve is how to make his wife both a servant and a companion; his attitude will evolve throughout the centuries, and this will also entail an evolution in woman’s destiny.11 ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
575: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, #NFDB
576:The truth is, however, that when two individuals detest each other, while being unable to get along without each other, it is not of all human relations the truest and most moving, but rather the most pitiable. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
577:They seemed to confirm Simone de Beauvoir’s observation about real life women, which I would also, eventually, uncover: that, by definition, we “are married, or have been, or plan to be, or suffer from not being. ~ Rebecca Traister, #NFDB
578:When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values, and it is impossible for me to examine this conviction with an objective eye. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
579:When I was grown up I wanted to crunch flowering almond trees, and take bites out of the the rainbow nougats of the sunset. Against the night sky of New York, the neon signs appeared to me like giant sweatmeats ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
580:Women- except in certain abstract gatherings such as conferences- do not use "we"; men say "women," and women adopt this word to refer to themselves; but they do not posit themselves authentically as Subjects . ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
581:Love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
582:Only man can be an enemy for man; only he can rob him of the meaning of his acts and his life because it also belongs only to him alone to confirm it in its existence, to recognize it in actual fact as a freedom ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
583:The innumerable conflicts that set men and women against one another come from the fact that neither is prepared to assume all the consequences of this situation which the one has offered and the other accepted. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
584:At night I would climb the steps to the Sacre-Coeur, and I would watch Paris, that futile oasis, scintillating in the wilderness of space. I would weep, because it was so beautiful, and because it was so useless. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
585:Les cas extrêmes nous attachaient, au même titre que les névroses et les psychoses : on y retrouvait exagérées, épurées, dotées d'un saisissant relief les attitudes et les passions des gens qu'on appelle normaux. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
586:To will freedom and to will to disclose being are one and the same choice; hence, freedom takes a positive and constructive step which causes being to pass to existence in a movement which is constantly surpassed. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
587:A woman's situation, i.e those meanings derived from the total context in which she comes to maturity, disposes her to apprehend her body not as instrument of her transcendence, but "an object destined for another. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
588:I admire Freud a great deal as a person and thinker. Despite everything, I find his work very, very rich, but I think that for women he has been absolutely disastrous. And even more so, everyone who came after him. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
589:So not every female human being is necessarily a woman; she must take part in this mysterious and endangered reality known as femininity. Is femininity secreted by the ovaries? Is it enshrined in a Platonic heaven? ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
590: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
591:Si la mujer es prosaica, casera, bajamente utilitaria, se debe a que le imponen que consagre su existencia a preparar alimentos y limpiar deyecciones. No será de ahí de donde podrá extraer el sentido de la grandeza. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
592:There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.'
There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
593:Primitive people alienate themselves in their mana, their totem; civilized people in their individual souls, their egos, their names, their possessions, and their work: here is the first temptation of inauthenticity. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
594:Elles [Rosa Luxembourg, Marie Curie] démontrent avec éclat que ce n'est pas l'infériorité des femmes qui a déterminé leur insignifiance historique: c'est leur insignifiance historique qui les a vouées à l'infériorité. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
595:N’oubliez jamais qu’il suffira d’une crise politique, économique ou religieuse pour que les droits des femmes soient remis en question. Ces droits ne sont jamais acquis. Vous devrez rester vigilantes votre vie durant. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
596: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
597:--There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time. --But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
598:The women of today are in a fair way to dethrone the myth of femininity; they are beginning to affirm their independence in concrete ways; but they do not easily succeed in living completely the life of a human being. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
599:It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
600:¿Qué esperamos pues del otro?
Estaría equivocada en esperar que el otro me llevara lejos a través de un devenir sin fin: ningún acto humano se propaga hasta el infinito. Lo que otro crea a partir de mí no es ya mío. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
601:The passionate man seeks possession; he seeks to attain being. The failure and the hell which he creates for himself have been described often enough. He causes certain rare treasures to appear in the world, but he also ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
602:When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
603:ephemeral and useless, flowers exemplify the gratuitousness of occasions that mean expenses and luxury; blooming in vases, doomed to a rapid death, flowers are ceremonial bonfires, incense and myrrh, libation, sacrifice. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
604:If you are writing something in which you are really involved, you don't even need to think about it any longer. The situation itself demands your total commitment as an individual, just as in your political commitments. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
605:--There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time.
--But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
606:I have never read a really good novel written by a man where women are portrayed as they truly are. They can be portrayed externally very well - Stendhal's Madame de Renal, for example - but only as seen from the outside. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
607:No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
608:If I want to define myself, I first have to say, “I am a woman”; all other assertions will arise from this basic truth. A man never begins by positing himself as an individual of a certain sex: that he is a man is obvious. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
609:How will the fact of being women have affected our lives? What precise opportunities have been given us, and which ones have been denied? What destiny awaits our younger sisters, and in which direction should we point them? ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
610:L'idéal de la beauté féminine est variable; mais certaines exigences demeurent constantes; entre autres, puisque la femme est destinée à être possédée, il faut que son corps offre les qualités inertes et passives d'un objet. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
611:Cependant c'est là le premier mensonge, la première trahison de la femme: c'est celle de la vie même qui, fût-elle revêtue des formes les plus attrayantes, est toujours habitée par les ferments de la vieillesse et de la mort. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
612:If you try consciously to be avant-garde, it's a little dangerous, like the present state of modern painting, where dealers try to be avant-garde, and under this pretext, painters take some old scraps and call it avant-garde. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
613:There are cases where the slave does not know his servitude and where it is necessary to bring the seed of his liberation to him from the outside: his submission is not enough to justify the tyranny which is imposed upon him. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
614:To reject the notions of the eternal feminine, the black soul, or the Jewish character is not to deny that there are today Jews, blacks, or women: this denial is not a liberation for those concerned but an inauthentic flight. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
615:To show your true ability is always, in a sense, to surpass the limits of your ability, to go a little beyond them: to dare, to seek, to invent; it is at such a moment that new talents are revealed, discovered, and realized ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
616:Ce sont eux [les hommes] qui ont toujours tenu le sort de la femme entre leurs mains; et ils n'en ont pas décidé en fonction de son intérêt; c'est à leurs propres projets, à leurs craintes, à leurs besoins qu'il-ont eu régard. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
617:Je crois que je comprends bien comment ca peut te faire. Nous avons essayée de batir notre amour par-delà les instants, mais seuls les instants sont surs. Pour le reste on a besoin de foi; et la foi, est-ce courage ou paresse? ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
618:Categoria Celuilalt este în aceeaşi măsură originară ca şi conştiinţa
însăşi. In societăţile cele mai primitive, în mitologiile cele mai
vechi, se regăseşte întotdeauna o dualitate care este a Aceluiaşi şi a
Celuilalt. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
619:Es wird Abend, aber die Luft ist noch lau. Dies ist einer jener ergreifender Augenblicke, in denen Erde und Menschen so vollkommen miteinander harmonieren, dass es unmöglich scheint, jemanden zu finden, der nicht glücklich ist. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
620:In real life, and usually in good novels and films, individuals are not defined only by their sexuality. Each has a history, and his or her eroticism is involved in a certain situation. It may even be that situation creates it. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
621:Manette:
- Cette Jeunesse ne croit à rien. [...] Vous ne croyez pas non plus à grand-chose. [...] André est contre tous. C'est ça la faute. C'est pour ça que Philippe (son fils) a mal tourné. Il faut être pour quelque chose. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
622:In the old days the worst part of my depression used to be the astonishment it caused me, the scandalized way in which I fought against it. Nowadays, on the other hand, I accept it cheerfully enough, like an old familiar friend. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
623:It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
624:It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life’s parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
625:Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
626:Has my watch stopped? No. But its hands do not seem to be going around. Don't look at them. Think of something else - anything else: think of yesterday, a calm, ordinary, easy-flowing day, in spite of the nervous tension of waiting. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
627:I should like this sky, this quiet water, to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
628:Today I believe that, under the specially privileged conditions in which I exist, life contains two main truths which we must face simultaneously, and between which there is no choice - the joy of being, the horror of being no more. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
629:Sartre’la karşılaştığım zaman, her şeyi kazandığıma inanmıştım. Onun yanında benim kendimi gerçekleştirmem başarısızlığa uğrayamazdı. Şimdi kendi kendime şunu söylüyorum: Kurtuluşu bir başkasında görmek, yıkılmanın en güvenli yoludur ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
630:Our hold on the future is limited; the movement of expansion of existence requires that we strive at every moment to amplify it; but where it stops our future stops too; beyond, there is nothing more because nothing more is disclosed. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
631:El día que una mujer pueda no amar con su debilidad sino con su fuerza, no escapar de sí misma sino encontrarse, no humillarse sino afirmarse, ese día el amor será para ella, como para el hombre, fuente de vida y no un peligro mortal". ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
632:biology alone cannot provide an answer to the question that concerns us: why is woman the Other? The question is how, in her, nature has been taken on in the course of history; the question is what humanity has made of the human female. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
633:It is because I reject lies and running away that I am accused of pessimism; but this rejection implies hope — the hope that truth may be of use. And this is a more optimistic attitude than the choice of indifference, ignorance or sham. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
634:To refuse everything, to say, even when there is something which really should be done, "Ah, that's no longer feminist," is a pessimistic, even masochistic tendency in women, the result of having been habituated to inertia, to pessimism. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
635:When I was writing Green Girl,I was reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and she’s very dismissive of the young girl. She writes about the girl as being from this space of bad faith and blankness. I’m more interested in a messy space. ~ Kate Zambreno, #NFDB
636:Arapski geograf El Bekri, govoreći o Slovenima, kaže: "Ako se oženi i vidi da je njegova žena nevina, on joj kaže: "Da si nešto vredela, muškarci bi te voleli i našao bi se jedan koji bi ti oduzeo nevinost." Zatim je otera i odriče je se. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
637:Nature asserts itself in the face of Spirit which it denies while assuming it; the individual is again found in the collectivity within which he is lost; & each man's death is fulfilled by being cancelled out into the Life of Mankind. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
638:Between women love is contemplation; caresses are meant less to appropriate the other than to recreate oneself slowly through her; separation is eliminated, there is neither fight nor victory nor defeat; each one is both subject and object ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
639:If I had rediscovered in Heaven, amplified to infinity, the monstrous alliance of fragility and implacability, of caprice and artificial necessity which had oppressed me since my birth, rather than worship Him I would have chosen damnation. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
640:Simone de Beauvoir believed adolescence is when girls realize that men have the power and that their only power comes from consenting to become submissive adored objects. They do not suffer from the penis envy Freud postulated, but from power envy. ~ Mary Pipher, #NFDB
641:If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through "the eternal feminine," and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman? ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
642:Thrown into the atmosphere of action [in 1954], I suddenly understood the kind of neurosis that dominated all my previous work. I had not been able to recognize it before: I was inside. Simone de Beauvoir had guessed these reasons before I did. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
643:How, indeed, could the myth of Cinderella not keep all its validity? Everything still encourages the young girl to expect fortune and happiness from some Prince Charming rather than to attempt by herself their difficult and uncertain conquest. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
644:In the unfertilised egg not even the concept of femaleness is as yet established. As Hegel justly remarks the sexual relation cannot be referred back to the relation of the gametes. It is our duty, then, to study the female organism as a whole. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
645:Trudno bowiem mężczyźnie ocenić ogromne znaczenie dyskryminacji społecznych, które na zewnątrz wydają się błahe, a których konsekwencje moralne i intelektualne tkwią w kobiecie tak głęboko, że wydają się mieć źródło w jej pierwotnej strukturze. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
646:Alone: for the first time I understood the terrible significance of that word. Alone without a witness, without anyone to speak to, without refuge. The breath in my body, the blood in my veins, all this hurly-burly in my head existed for nobody. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
647:It's important that you think of your relationship with the world and the way you can express that world and that you not be stopped if it scandalizes or embarrasses; but you must not look for scandal or for the avant-garde as a thing in itself. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
648:Aucun destin biologique, psychique, économique ne définit la figure que revêt au sein de la societé la femelle humain; c'est l'ensemble de la civilisation qui élabore ce produit intermédiaire entre le mâle et le castrat qu'on qualifie de féminin. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
649:Existence asserts itself as an absolute which must seek its justification within itself and not suppress itself. To attain this truth, man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
650:Feminism is a revolutionary movement which is different from the class struggle movement, the proletarian movement, but which is a movement which must be leftist. By that I mean at the extreme left, a movement working to overthrow the whole society. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
651:Essere donna non è un dato naturale, ma il risultato di una storia. Non c'è un destino biologico e psicologico che definisce la donna in quanto tale. Tale destino è la conseguenza della storia della civiltà, e per ogni donna la storia della sua vita. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
652:It is a difficult matter for man to realize the extreme importance of social discriminations which seem outwardly insignificant but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
653:Membre d’une espèce privilégiée, bénéficiant au départ d’une avance considérable, si dans l’absolu un homme ne valait pas plus que moi, je jugerais que, relativement, il valait moins : pour le reconnaître comme mon égal, il fallait qu’il me dépassât. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
654:It is for man to establish the reign of liberty in the midst of the world of the given. To gain the supreme victory, it is necessary, for one thing, that by and through their natural differentiation men and women unequivocally affirm their brotherhood. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
655:No one saves an e-mail, because it’s so inherently impersonal. I worry about posterity in general. All the great love letters – from Simone de Beauvoir to Sartre, from Samuel Clemens to his wife, Olivia – I don’t know, I always think about what will be lost— ~ Gillian Flynn, #NFDB
656:Une éthique véritablement socialiste, c'est-à-dire qui cherche la justice sans supprimer la liberté, qui impose aux individus des charges mais sans abolir l'individualité, se trouvera fort embarrassée par les problèmes que pose la condition de la femme. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
657:No one saves an e-mail, because it's so inherently impersonal. I worry about posterity in general. All the great love letters - from Simone de Beauvoir to Sartre, from Samuel Clemens to his wife, Olivia - I don't know, I always think about what will be lost - ~ Gillian Flynn, #NFDB
658:Er erzählte mir Geschichten, und vor allem ging er mit mir spazieren. Er zeigte mir Straßen und Plätze, Quais und Kanäle, die Friedhöfe, die Hafenplätze und Lagerhäuser, die unsicheren Viertel, die Kneipen - so viele Ecken von Paris, die ich nicht kannte. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
659:Mais même au XIX siècle elles étaient souvent obligées de se cacher; elles n'avaient pas même 'une chambre à elles', c'est-à-dire qu'elles ne jouissaient pas de cette indépendance matérielle qui est une des conditions nécessaires de la liberté intérieure. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
660:One can hardly tell women that washing up saucepans is their divine mission, [so] they are told that bringing up children is their divine mission. But the way things are in the world, bringing up children has a great deal in common with washing up saucepans. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
661:No dia em que for possível à mulher amar na totalidade, não na sua fraqueza, não para fugir de si mesma mas para se encontrar, não para se demitir mas para se afirmar, nesse dia o amor tornar-se-á para ela, como para o homem, fonte de vida e não perigo mortal ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
662:Seule une révolution morale, et non pas sociale ni politique ni technique, ramènerait l'homme à sa vérité perdue. Du moins peut-on opérer pour son compte cette conversation: alors on accède à la joie, malgré ce monde d'absurdité et de désordre qui nous cerne. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
663:But this element of failure is a very condition of his life; one can never dream of eliminating it without immediately dreaming of death. This does not mean that one should consent to failure, but rather one must consent to struggle against it without respite. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
664:There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial...Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost...I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself! ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
665:Il y a toujours eu des femmes; elles sont femmes par leur structure physiologique; aussi loin que l'histoire remonte, elles ont toujours été subordinnées à l'homme; leur dépendance n'est pas la conséquence d'un événement ou d'un devenir, elle n'est pas arrivée. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
666:A mi alrededor se interrogaban sobre la suerte que amenazaba a millones de hombres, era también mi suerte; y a mí sólo me importaba una sonrisa, una sonrisa que no detendría las bombas atómicas, que no podía nada contra nada, ni por nadie; pero me ocultaba todo. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
667:It is not mere chance that makes families speak of a child who is 'extraordinary for his age' and also of an old man who is 'extraordinary for his age'; the extraordinariness lies in their behaving like human beings when they are either not yet or no longer men. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
668:There are topics which are common to men and women. I think that if a woman speaks of oppression, of misery, she will speak of it in exactly the same way as a man. But if she speaks of her own personal problems as a woman, she will obviously speak in another way. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
669:This privilege, which he alone possesses, of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects, is what he shares with all his fellow-men. In turn an object for others, he is nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which he depends. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
670:C'est pour sauvegarder ce mystère que les hommes ont supplié longtemps les femmes de ne pas abandoner les robes longues (...) tout ce qui accentue en l'Autre la différence le rend plus désirable, puisque c'est l'Autre en tant que tel que l'homme veut s'approprier. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
671: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
672:[...] [I]’m reliving it street by street, hour by hour, with the mission of neutralizing it, and transforming it into an inoffensive past that i can keep in my heart without either disowning it or suffering from it. That’s not easy. It’s at once painful and poetic. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
673:Jaques was only what he was; but from a distance he became something more, became everything to me, everything I did not possess. It was to him I owed pains and pleasures whose violence alone saved me from the deserts of boredom in which I found myself bogged down. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
674:No existe muerte natural: nada de lo que sucede al hombre es natural puesto que su sola presencia cuestiona al mundo. Todos los hombres son mortales: pero para todos los hombres la muerte es un accidente y, aunque la concozca y la acepte, es una violencia indebida. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
675:One night I summoned God, if He really existed, to show Himself to me. He didn't, and I never addressed another word to Him. In my heart of hearts I was very glad He didn't exist. I should have hated it if what was going on here below had had to end up in eternity. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
676:I was still keenly aware as in my childhood of the inexplicable nature of my presence here on earth; where had I come from here; where was I going? I often thought about these things with a kind of stupefied horror and used to fill my diary with long self-communings ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
677:Life has made me discover the world as it is, that is, a world of suffering and oppression, of undernourishment for the majority of people, things that I didn't know when I was young and when I imagined that to discover the world was to discover something beautiful. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
678:There’s something inside me, something as hard as an iron bar, that crushes my will and stops every flicker of enthusiasm or desire. I strip my heart bare, and have a soul as black as any pitch. The thought that mine is not an isolated case offers me no consolation. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
679:I asked Isabelle whether she was happy. “I never ask myself, so I suppose the answer is yes.” At all events she likes the moment of waking up. That seems to me a pretty good definition of happiness! It is the same with me: every morning, when I open my eyes, I smile. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
680:The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy...It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
681:I consider it almost antifeminist to say that there is a feminine nature which expresses itself differently, that a woman speaks her body more than a man, because after all, men also speak their bodies when they write. Everything is implicated in the work of a writer. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
682: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
683:Mais le pire, quand on habite une prison sans barreaux, c'est qu'on n'a pas même conscience des écrans qui bouchent l'horizon; j'errais à travers un épais brouillard, et je le croyais transparent. Les choses qui m'échappaient, je n'en entrevoyais même pas la présence. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
684: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." ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
685:Mais de toute façon, engendrer, allaiter ne sont pas des activités, ce sont des fonctions naturelles; aucun projet n'y est engagé; c'est pourquoi la femme n'y trouve pas le motif d'une affirmation hautaine de son existence; elle subit passivement son destin biologique. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
686:Sometimes you can accept an important post, on condition that it really puts you in a position to help women. Unfortunately, women who have important posts very often adopt masculine standards-power, ambition, personal success - and cut themselves off from other women. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
687:I was no longer a vacant mind, an abstracted gaze, but the turbulent fragrance of the waving grain, the intimate smell of the heather moors, the dense heat of noon or the shiver of twilight; I was heavy; yet I was as vapour in the blue airs of summer and knew no bounds. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
688:My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
689: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
690:I don't agree with a core statement by most feminists, the statement by Simone de Beauvoir: "One is not born a woman, one becomes one." Even as a schoolgirl I wasn't convinced by the claim that gender has nothing to do with biology and is only shaped by one's environment. ~ Kristina Schroder, #NFDB
691:We will not let ourselves be intimidated by the number and violence of attacks against women; nor be fooled by the self-serving praise showered on the “real woman”; nor be won over by men’s enthusiasm for her destiny, a destiny they would not for the world want to share. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
692:Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
693:The state of emotional intoxication allows one to grasp existence in one's self and in the other, as both subjectivity and passivity. The two partners merge in this ambiguous unity; each one is freed of his own presence and achieves immediate communication with the other. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
694:There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
695:Constituye una paradoja criminal rehusar a la mujer toda actividad pública, cerrarle las carreras masculinas, proclamar en todos los dominios su incapacidad y confiarle, al mismo tiempo, la empresa más delicada y más grave de cuantas existen...la formación de un ser humano. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
696:On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her 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 and not of mortal danger. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
697:Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly. Let but the future be opened to her, and she will no longer be compelled to linger in the present. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
698:Being on the fringes of the world is not the best place for someone who intends to re-create it: here again, to go beyond the given, one must be deeply rooted in it. Personal accomplishments are almost impossible in human categories collectively kept in an inferior situation. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
699:El hombre no es entonces sino un accidente indiferente en la superficie de la tierra; está sobre la tierra como el explorador perdido en el desierto; puede ir a izquierda, a derecha, puede ir donde quiera, pero no llegará jamás a ninguna parte, y la arena cubrirá sus huellas. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
700:There are moments when you have to write certain things and you don't have to think of your sex. If you are writing about the population of the thirteenth district in Paris, even if you are writing on the women in the thirteenth district, there's no need to consider your sex. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
701:.. Et c'était simple de lui dire de s'asseoir ; quand on pense à tout ce qu'on pourrait faire et qu'on ne fait pas ! toutes les occasions qu'on laisse échapper ! on a pas l'idée, pas l'élan ; au lieu d'être ouvert on est fermé ; c'est ça le grand péché : le péché par omission. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
702:U lepo obučenoj i iskićenoj ženi priroda je prisutna, ali je zarobljena, modelirana ljudskom voljom po želji muškarca. Žena je utoliko privlačnija ukoliko je njena priroda bujnija i u njoj potčinjenija - to je žena "sofističke opsene" koja je uvek bila idealni erotski objekat. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
703: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
704:The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another; it is never the given that confers superiorities: ‘virtue’, as the ancients called it, is defined on the level of ‘that which depends on us’. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
705:On s'empresse de les décharger de toute tâche pénible et de tout souci: c'est les délivrer du même coup de toute responsabilité. On espère qu'ainsi dupées, séduites par la facilité de leur condition, elles accepteront le rôle de mère et de ménagére dans lequel on veut les confiner. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
706:All she had to do was make the simplest of gestures - open her hands and let go her hold. She lifted one hand and moved the fingers of it; they responded, in surprise and obedience, and this obedience of a thousand little unsuspected muscles was in itself a miracle. Why ask for more? ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
707:If it is said men oppress women, the husband reacts indigntantly; he feels oppressed: he is; but in fact, it is the masculine code, the society developed by males and in their interest, that has defined the feminine condition in a form that is now for both sexes a source of distress. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
708:I willingly trust myself to chance. I let my thoughts wander, I digress, not only sitting at my work, but all day long, all night even. It often happens that a sentence suddenly runs through my head before I go to bed, or when I am unable to sleep, and I get up again and write it down. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
709:La stupidità ci faceva ridere, era uno dei nostri grandi motivi di spasso, ma aveva anche qualcosa di spaventevole. Se avesse prevalso, non avremmo più avuto il diritto di pensare, di prendere in giro, di provare veri desideri, veri piaceri. Bisognava combatterla o rinunciare a vivere. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
710:My overflowing leisure handed me the world and at the same time prevented me from seeing it. Just as the sun, filtering through the closed venetian blinds on a hot afternoon, makes the whole magnificence of summer blaze in my mind; whereas if I face its direct harsh glare it blinds me. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
711:One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
712:As far as I am concerned sexuality no longer exists. I used to call this indifference serenity: all at once I have come to see it in another light—it is a mutilation; it is the loss of a sense. The lack of it makes me blind to the needs, the pains, and the joys of those who do possess it. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
713:In amorous passion particularly, one does not want the beloved being to be admired objectively; one prefers to think her unknown, unrecognized; the lover thinks that his appropriation of her is greater if he is alone in revealing her worth. That is the genuine thing offered by all passion. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
714:; the man who does not "understand" a woman is happy to replace his subjective deficiency with an objective resistance; instead of admitting his ignorance, he recognizes the presence of a mystery exterior to himself: here is an excuse that flatters his laziness and vanity at the same time. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
715:I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
716:La puerta se abrirá lentamente y veré lo que hay detrás de la puerta. Es el porvenir. La puerta del porvenir va a abrirse. Lentamente. Implacablemente. Estoy sobre el umbral. No hay más que esta puerta y lo que acecha detrás. Tengo miedo. Y no puedo llamar a nadie en mi auxilio. Tengo miedo. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
717:But an action which wants to serve man ought to be careful not to forget him on the way, if it chooses to fulfill itself blindly, it will lose its meaning or will take on an unforeseen meaning; for the goal is not fixed once & for all; it is defined all along the road which leads up to it. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
718:Can one say that there is a way of crying out, of speaking, which is properly feminine? Personally, I don't think so. In the end, I find this is another way of putting women in a kind of singularity, a ghetto, which is not what I want. I want them to be singular and universal at the same time. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
719:Ce n'est gue' re que dans les asiles que les coquettes gardent avec ente" tement une foi entie' re en des regards absents; normalement, elles re clament des te moins. Women fond of dress are hardly ever entirely satisfied not to be seen, except among the insane; usually they want witnesses. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
720:My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
721:Economically, men and women almost form two castes; all things being equal, the former have better jobs, higher wages, and greater chances to succeed than their new female competitors; they occupy many more places in industry, in politics, and so forth, and they hold the most important positions. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
722:Cette impuissance physique se traduit par une timidité plus générale: elle ne croit pas á une force qu'elle n'a pas expérimentée dans son corps; elle n'ose pas entreprendrem se révolter, inventer: vouée à la docilité, à la résignation, elle ne peut qu'accepter dans la société une place toute faite. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
723:Em verdade, as mulheres nunca opuseram os valores femininos aos valores masculinos; foram os homens, desejosos de manter as prerrogativas masculinas, que inventaram essa divisão: pretenderam criar um campo de domínio feminino - reinado da vida, da imanência - tão somente para nele encerrar a mulher ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
724:La femme?sait que quand on la regarde on ne la distingue pas de son apparence: elle est juge e, respecte e, de sire e a' travers sa toilette. Woman?knows that when she is looked at she is not considered apart from her appearance: she is judged, respected, desired, by and through her toilette. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
725:For twenty years it seemed to me that I had been taking part in a game, and that one day, at the stroke of midnight, I would return to the land of shadows. ...In a little while, the hands would be pointing to midnight; they would point to midnight tomorrow and the next day, and I would still be here. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
726:In those days we saw every sort of object as though it were one of those tiny handkerchiefs from which a conjuror can produce silk scarfs, streamers, flags, and yards of ribbon. A cup of coffee became a kaleidoscope in which we could spend ages watching the mutable reflections of ceiling or chandelier. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
727:Pure, mi vergogno di lamentarmi. Quando si è avuta questa grande cosa che sento dentro di me, inalterabile, si può sopportare tutto il resto. L'essenza della mia gioia non è alla mercè delle circostanze esterne, per raggiungerla occorrerebbe una difficoltà proveniente direttamente da lui o da me stessa. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
728:Împingând la paroxism viaţa austeră care-mi fusese hărăzită, am transformat-o în vocaţie; am convertit privaţiunea de plăceri în asceză; în loc să mă târăsc de la o zi la alta, într-o plictisitoare uniformitate, mi-o luasem mie însămi înainte, mută, cu privirea fixă, îndreptându-mă către o ţintă ascunsă. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
729:The phenomena of asexual propagation and of parthenogenesis appear to be neither more nor less fundamental than those of sexual reproduction. I have said that the latter has no claim a priori to be considered basic; but neither does any fact indicate that it is reducible to any more fundamental mechanism. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
730:... ¡Dios mío! ¡Haz que existas! Haz que haya un cielo y un infierno me pasearé por los senderos del paraíso con mi hijo y con mi hija querida y ellos se retorcerán en las llamas de la envidia los miraré tostarse y gemir reiré y los niños reirán conmigo. Me debes esa revancha Dios mío. Exijo que me la des. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
731:Es mío solamente aquello en lo que reconozco mi ser y no puedo reconocerlo sino ahí donde estoy comprometido; para que un objeto me pertenezca, es preciso que haya sido fundado por mí: no es totalmente mío si no lo he fundado en su totalidad. La única realidad que me pertenece enteramente es pues, mi acto. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
732:It is a mistake to seek in fantasies the key to concrete behaviour; for fantasies are created and cherished as fantasies. The little girl who dreams of violation with mingled horror and acquiescence does not really wish to be violated and if such a thing should happen it would be a hateful calamity. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
733:Work almost always has a double aspect: it is a bondage, a wearisome drudgery; but it is also a source of interest, a steadying element, a factor that helps to integrate the worker with society. Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
734:Love in the modern sense does not exist in antiquity except outside of official society,” notes Engels: at the very point where antiquity broke off its penchant for sexual love, the Middle Ages took it up again with adultery. And this is the form that love will take as long as the institution of marriage lasts. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
735:The time that one gains cannot be accumulated in a storehouse; it is contradictory to want to save up existence, which, the fact is, exists only by being spent and there is a good case for showing that airplanes, machines, the telephone, and the radio do not make men of today happier than those of former times. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
736:Gozar de las cosas bellas le basta; acepta el lujo y la vida fácil, le gusta la felicidad. Yo necesito una vida devoradora. Necesito obrar, gastarme, realizarme, necesito un fin que alcanzar, dificultades que vencer, una obra que cumplir. No estoy hecha para el lujo. Nunca podrá satisfacerme lo que le satisface. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
737:Virginia Woolf thought a lot about her own sex when she wrote. In the best sense of the word, her writing is very feminine, and by that I mean that women are supposed to be very sensitive to all the sensations of nature, much more so than men, much more contemplative. It's this quality that marks her best works. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
738:Il fatto è che sono una scrittrice: una donna scrittrice non è una donna di casa che scrive, ma qualcuno la cui intera esistenza è condizionata dallo scrivere. È una vita che ne vale un’altra: che ha i suoi motivi, il suo ordine, i suoi fini che si possono giudicare stravaganti solo se di essa non si capisce niente. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
739:It is difficult for men to measure the enormous extent of social discrimination that seems insignificant form the outside and whose moral and intellectual repercussions are so deep in woman that they appear to spring from an original nature. The man most sympathetic to women never knows her concrete situation fully. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
740:I would stand transfixed before the windows of the confectioners' shops, fascinated by the luminous sparkle of candied fruits, the cloudy lustre of jellies, the kaleidoscope inflorescence of acidulated fruit drops - red, green, orange, violet: I coveted the colours themselves as much as the pleasure they promised me. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
741:The individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of himself. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
742:Truthfully speaking, women are dangerous, even those who aren't feminists, because there has always been a women's revolt. Only it has usually translated itself into solitary, individualist, disagreeable manifestations - the whole history of the taming of the shrew, the woman-shrew. They weren't shrews without cause. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
743:Women – the Parcae and Moirai – weave human destiny; but they also cut the threads. In most folk representations, Death is woman and women mourn the dead because death is their work.fn6 Thus, Mother Earth has a face of darkness: she is chaos, where everything comes from and must return to one day; she is Nothingness. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
744:Anais Nin shows an occasional grace in writing, but her work is quite foreign to me, precisely because she wants so much to be feminine and not feminist. And then she is so gaga before so many men. She talks about men I know in France, men who were less than nothing, and she considers them kings, extraordinary people. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
745:To be feminist doesn't mean simply to do nothing, to reduce yourself to total impotence under the pretext of refusing masculine values. There is a problematic, a very difficult dialectic between accepting power and refusing it, accepting certain masculine values, and wanting to transform them. I think it's worth a try. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
746:Tous les enfants essaient de compenser la séparation du sevrage par des conduites de séduction et de parade; on oblige le garçon à dépasser ce stade, on le délivre de son narcissisme en le fixant sur son pénis; tandis que la fillette est confirmée dans cette tendance à se faire objet qui est commune à tous les enfants. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
747:Between women love is contemplative; caresses are intended less to gain possession of the other than gradually to re-create the self through her; separateness is abolished, there is no struggle, no victory, no defeat; in exact reciprocity each is at once subject and object, sovereign and slave; duality become mutuality. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
748:at the end of the last century, the police discovered two little girls of twelve or thirteen in a bordello; a trial was held where they testified; they spoke of their clients, who were important gentlemen; one of them opened her mouth to give a name. The judge abruptly stopped her: Do not sully the name of an honest man! ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
749:[From a New York Times biography from May 27, 2010 entitled Introduction to Simone de Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex']
Beauvoir herself was as devout an atheist as she had once been a Catholic, and she dismisses religions — even when they worship a goddess — as the inventions of men to perpetuate their dominion. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
750:Ter a porta fechada, os lábios fechados: mas o meu silêncio proclama ordens."tu não dizes nada, e eu vou" ou "não dizes nada, e eu não vou". Toda a minha presença é palavra. Avança então, avança no lodo da noite. Decide. Eu decidi a tua morte e não estamos pagos. Mais ainda. Queria pedir misericórdia: não há misericórdia. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
751:A woman alone always seems a little unusual; it is not true that men respect women: they respect each other through their women—wives, mistresses, “kept” women; when masculine protection no longer extends over her, woman is disarmed before a superior caste that is aggressive, sneering, or hostile. As an “erotic perversion, ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
752:It's true that this is one of the problems which often arises among my radical, revolutionary feminist friends: Do you have to join the system or not? On the one hand, if you don't, you risk being ineffectual. But if you do, from that moment on, you place your feminism at the service of a system which you want to take apart. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
753:from one minute to the next the present is merely an honorary past. It must be filled unceasingly anew to dissemble the curse it carries within itself; that is why Americans like speed, alcohol, thriller films and any sensational news: the demand for new things, and ever newer things, is feverish since nowhere will they rest. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
754:No subject posits itself spontaneously and at once as the inessential from the outset; it is not the Other who, defining itself as Other, defines the One; the Other is posited as Other by the One positing itself as One. But in order for the Other not to turn into the One, the Other has to submit to this foreign point of view. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
755:Some men, instead of building their existence upon the indefinite unfolding of time, propose to assert it in its eternal aspect & to achieve it as an absolute. They hope, thereby, to surmount the ambiguity of their condition. Thus, many intellectuals seek their salvation in either in critical thought or creative activity. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
756:They [Americans] want to believe that Good and Evil can be defined in precise categories, that Good is already, or will be easily achieved. ... if this optimism appears too superficial, they will try to create a kind of anti-God: the U.S.S.R. That is Evil, and it only needs to be annihilated to re-establish the reign of Good. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
757:On nous exhorte: 'Soyez femmes, restez femmes, devenez femmes.' Tout être humain femelle n'est donc pas nécessairament une femme; il lui faut participer à cette réalité mystérieuse et menacée qu'est la féminité. (...) Celle-ci est-elle sécrétée par les ovoires? Suffit-il d'un jupon à frou-frou pour la faire descendre sur terre? ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
758:Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. But we have seen that it is one of the lies of the serious mind to attempt to give the word "useful" an absolute meaning; nothing is useful if it is not useful to man; nothing is useful to man if the latter is not in a position to define his own ends and values, if he is not free. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
759:Dès l'origine de l'humanité, leur privilège biologique a permis aux mâles de s'affirmer seuls comme sujets souverains; ils n'ont jamais abdiqué ce privilège (...) Condamnée à jouer le rôle de l'Autre, la femme était aussi condamnée à ne posséder qu'une puissance précaire: esclave ou idole ce n'est jamais elle qui a choisi son lot. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
760:The renewed use of lobotomy today is particularly applicable to women: Because they do routine things, it is possible to take away their spirit of revolt, of debate, of criticism, and still leave them perfectly capable of making stews or washing dishes. It's terrible, this tendency to consider women something dangerous to society. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
761:I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
762:I hadn't known Chancel very well, but ten days earlier I had seen him laughing with the others around the Christmas tree. Maybe Robert was right; the distance between the living and the dead really isn't very great. And yet, like myself, those future corpses who were drinking their coffee in silence appeared ashamed to be so alive. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
763:Si no soy sino un cuerpo, sólo un lugar al sol y el instante que mide mi suspiro, entonces heme aquí liberado de todas las inquietudes, los temores, las penas. Nada me conmueve, nada me importa. No estoy ligado sino a ese minuto que llena mi vida: ella sola es una presa tangible, una presencia. No existe sino la impresión del momento. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
764:Today it strikes me that the most important aspect of these conversations was not so much what we said as what we took for granted, and what in fact was not so at all. We were wrong about almost everything. An accurate character sketch must take these errors into account, since they expressed one kind of reality - our actual situation. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
765:Ils tenaient beaucoup à respecter les nuances de leurs rapports. Une amitié est un délicat édifice; elle s'accommode de certains partages mais elle réclame aussi des monopoles. Chacune des combinaisons que nous formions - à deux, à trois, à quatre - avait sa physionomie et ses agréments: il convenait de ne pas sacrifier cette diversité. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
766:One afternoon Clairaut came over to me with a book in his hand: “Mademoiselle de Beauvoir,” he began, in an inquisitorial tone, “what do you make of Brochard who is of the opinion that Aristotle’s God would be able to experience sexual pleasure?” Herbaud cast him a disdainful look: “I should hope so, for his sake,” he haughtily replied. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
767:¿Por qué ya no me quiere? Habría que saber porqué me ha querido. Una no se plantea la cuestión. Incluso si no se es ni orgullosa ni narcisista, es tan extraordinario ser una misma, justamente una misma, esto es tan único que parece natural que sea único también para alguien más. Me quería, es todo. Y para siempre ya que siempre seré yo. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
768:Feci presto a imparare a leggere.Tuttavia il mio pensiero si fermò a metà strada. Vedevo nell'immagine grafica l'esatto duplicato del suono che ad essa corrispondeva:emanavano insieme dalla cosa che esprimevano, e pertanto il loro rapporto non aveva nulla di arbitrario. La comprensione del segno non portò con se quella della convenzione. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
769:The validity of the cook's work is to be found only in the mouths of those at her table; she needs their approbation, demands that they appreciate her dishes and call for second helpings; she is upset if they are not hungry, to the point that one wonders whether the fried potatoes are for her husband or her husband for the fried potatoes. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
770:Por otra parte, yo era extremista: quería todo o nada. Si amaba sería para toda la vida y me daría entera con mi cuerpo, mi corazón, mi cabeza y mi pasado. Me negaba a picotear emociones, voluptuosidades ajenas a esa idea. A decir verdad no tuve oportunidad de probar la solidez de esos principios, pues ningún seductor trató de conmoverlos. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
771:Paule n'en pas à une contradiction près, mais celle-ci agaçait particulièrement Henri : elle le voulait le plus glorieux de tous les hommes, et elle affectait de mépriser la gloire ; c'est qu'elle s'entêtait à se rêver telle qu'il l'avait rêvée, jadis : hautaine, sublime ; et en même temps, bien sûr, elle vivait sur terre, comme tout le monde. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
772:But I must admit I didn´t like that idea; do the same thing as everyone else. Eating to live, living to eat - that had been the nightmare of my adolescence. If it meant going back to that, if would be just as well to turn on the gas at once. But I suppose everyone thinks of things like that: let´s turn on the gas at once. And you don´t turn it on. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
773:The Sahara was a spectacle as alive as the sea. The tints of the dunes changed according to the time of day and the angle of the light: golden as apricots from far off, when we drove close to them they turned to freshly made butter; behind us they grew pink; from sand to rock, the materials of which the desert was made varied as much as its tints. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
774:This is what democratic societies understand; they strive to confirm citizens in the feeling of their individual value; the whole ceremonious apparatus of baptism, marriage, and burial is the collectivity's homage to the individual; and the rites of justice seek to manifest society's respect for each of its members considered in his particularity. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
775:It is not a matter of approaching a fixed limit: absolute Knowledge or the happiness of man or the perfection of beauty; all human effort would then be doomed to failure, for with each step forward the horizon recedes a step; for man it is a matter of pursuing the expansion of his existence and of retrieving this very effort as an absolute. Science ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
776: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 does not 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, #NFDB
777:[Lost of the absolute] is in this sense that ''I no longer know what to do with my life" must be understood. Critics have been mistaken about the meaning of this phrase, seeing in it a cry of despair as in Simone de Beauvoir's "I have been cheated." When she uses this word it is to indicate that she claims from life an absolute which she cannot find there. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
778:I believe that we must use language. If it is used in a feminist perspective, with a feminist sensibility, language will find itself changed in a feminist manner. It will nonetheless be the language. You can't not use this universal instrument; you can't create an artificial language, in my opinion. But naturally, each writer must use it in his/her own way. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
779:What stops them is that as soon as they give the word “end” its double meaning of goal and fulfillment they clearly perceive this ambiguity of their condition, which is the most fundamental of all: that every living movement is a sliding toward death. But if they are willing to look it in the face they also discover that every movement toward death is life. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
780:Tinha caprichos, desobedecia simplesmente pelo prazer de não obedecer. Nas fotografias de família, eu mostro a língua, viro as costas e em torno de mim os outros riem. Essas pequenas vitórias animavam-se a não considerar insuperáveis as regras, os ritos, a rotina; constituem as raízes de certo otimismo que devia sobreviver a todos os processos de adestramento. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
781:Certains psychanalystes ont voulu donner des bases scientifiques à ces imaginations: tout le plaisir que la femme tire du coït viendrait de ce qu'elle châtre symboliquement le mâle et s'approprie son sexe. Mais il semble que ces théories elles-mêmes demandent à être psychanalysées et que les médecins qui les inventèrent y aient projeté des terreurs ancestrales. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
782:In 1949, I believed that social progress, the triumph of the proletariat, socialism would lead to the emancipation of women. But I saw that nothing came of it: first of all, that socialism was not achieved anywhere, and that in certain countries which called themselves socialist, the situation of women was no better than it was in so-called capitalist countries. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
783:One of the most remarkable features to be noted as we survey the scale of animal life is that as we go up, individuality is seen to be more and more fully developed. At the bottom, life is concerned only in the survival of the species as a whole; at the top, life seeks expression through particular individuals, while accomplishing also the survival of the group. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
784:Le privilège économique détenu par les hommes, leur valeur sociale, le prestige du mariage, l'utilité d'un appui masculin, tout engage les femmes à vouloir ardenment plaire aux hommes. Elles sont encore dans l'ensemble en situation de vassalité. Il s'ensuit que la femme se connaît et se choisit non en tant qu'elle existe pour soi mais telle que l'homme la définit. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
785:The little girl feels that her body is escaping her, that it is no longer the clear expression of her individuality: it becomes foreign to her; and at the same moment she is grasped by others as a thing: on the street, eyes follow her, her body is subject to comments; she would like to become invisible; she is afraid of becoming flesh and afraid to show her flesh. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
786:Masculine desire is as much an offence as it is a compliment; in so far as she feels herself responsible for her charm, or feels she is exerting it of her own accord, she is much pleased with her conquests, but to the extent that her face, her figure, her flesh are facts she must bear with, she wants to hide them from this independent stranger who lusts after them. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
787:In fact, people seem to be tired of fiction now. There are so many other ways of exploring humanity - by ethnology, psychoanalysis, and so on. It's a little boring to make up stories. So many people think that it's better to be very close to reality and to recount one's life as it is rather than to fictionalize, as they say, that is to transpose, and therefore to cheat. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
788:Scriassine studied me in turn. "You're not so dumb, you know. Generally I dislike intelligent women, maybe because they're not intelligent enough. They always want to prove to themselves, and to everyone else, how terribly smart they are. So all they do is talk and never understand anything. What struck me the first time I saw you was that way you have of keeping quiet. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
789:In oppressing, one becomes oppressed. Men are enchained by reason of their very sovereignty; it is because they alone earn money that their wives demand checks, it is because they alone engage in a business or profession that their wives require them to be successful, it is because they alone embody transcendence that their wives wish to rob them of it by taking charge... ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
790:In truth, to go for a walk with one's eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial, perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that right now they do most obviously exist. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
791:Porque não contestam as mulheres a soberania do macho? Nenhum sujeito se coloca imediata e espontaneamente como não essencial; não é o Outro que, definindo-se como Outro, define o Um; ele é posto como Outro pelo Um definindo-se como Um. Mas para que o Outro não se transforme no Um é preciso que se sujeite a esse ponto de vista alheio. De onde vem essa submissão na mulher? ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
792:She asked us to raise the curtain that was covering the window and she looked at the golden leaves of the trees. 'How lovely. I shouldn't see that from my flat!' She smiled. And both of us, my sister and I, had the same thought: it was that same smile that had dazzled us when we were little children, the radiant smile of a young woman. Where had it been between then and now? ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
793:I was struck by the absence, even among very young boys and girls, of any interior motivation; they were incapable of thinking, of inventing, of imagining, of choosing, of deciding for themselves; this incapacity was expressed by their conformism; in every domain of life they employed only the abstract measure of money, because they were unable to trust to their own judgment. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
794:There are jobs that can be done equally well by men or by women and that finally you can't see a difference. But from the moment that you involve yourself fully in writing a novel, for example, or an essay, then you are involved as a woman, in the same way that you can't deny your nationality - you are French, you are a man, you are a woman... all this passes into the writing. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
795:Every time I start on a new book, I am a beginner again. I doubt myself, I grow discouraged, all the work accomplished in the past is as though it never was, my first drafts are so shapeless that it seems impossible to go on with the attempt at all, right up until the moment - always imperceptible, there, too, there is a break - when it is has become impossible not to finish it. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
796:The present is a transitory existence which is made in order to be abolished: it retrieves itself only by transcending itself toward the permanence of future being; it is only as an instrument, as a means, it is only by it's efficacy with regard to the coming of the future that the present is validly realized: reduced to itself it is nothing , one may dispose of it as he pleases. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
797:Les coutures, les modes sont souvent apliquées à couper les corps féminin de a transcendance: la Chinoise aux pieds bandés peut à peine marcher, les griffes vernies de la star d'Hollywood la privent de ses mains, les hauts talons, les corsets, les paniers, les vertugadins, les crinolines étaient destinés moins à accentuer la combrure du corps féminin qu'à en augmenter l'impotence. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
798:Lo que es seguro es que ahora es muy difícil para las mujeres asumir a un tiempo su condición de individuo autónomo y su destino femenino; es la fuente de estas torpezas y malestares que a veces las presenta como "un sexo perdido". Y sin duda es más cómodo sufrir la esclavitud ciega que trabajar por la liberación: los muertos también están mejor adaptados a la tierra que los vivos. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
799:My teachers always said, "You're very talented, but don't set your heart on art. You're only a girl." I was inspired by Virginia Woolf in 1960, but they wouldn't let me write about her. They said she was a trivializer. I also wanted to do a paper on Simone de Beauvoir, and my philosophy teacher said, "Why would you write about the mistress? Write about the master." That was Sartre. ~ Carolee Schneemann, #NFDB
800:Scents, patterns of light and shade, winds and hurricanes — all pulsed inwardly through my own sinews and veins: so much so, indeed, that the throb of my blood stream, the swarming growth of my cells, the whole mystery of life housed within me seemed to be echoed by the shrilling cicadas, the gusts of wind that shook the trees, and the faint crunch of the moss as I trod it underfoot. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
801:Nu-mi placea, in continuare, idea de casatorie. [...] "Seara in pat, nu poti nici macar sa plangi in voie daca ai chef!" imi spuneam cu groaza. [...] daca ar fi trebuit sa-mi pun frau lacrimilor ar fi insemnat sa renunt la acea minima libertate de care aveam imperioasa nevoie. [...] seara, cand ma culcam, resimteam o imensa usurare la gandul ca, in sfarsit, traiesc putin si fara martori. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
802:Their behavior is defined and can be judged only within this given situation, and it is possible that in this situation, limited like every human situation, they realize a perfect assertion of their freedom. But once there appears a possibility of liberation, it is resignation of freedom not to exploit the possibility, a resignation which implies dishonesty and which is a positive fault. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
803:I think that feminism permits women to speak among themselves, instead of simply being resentful, having personal complaints, which get them nowhere and which make them sick and ill-tempered, depressive and poison the lives of their husbands and children. It's much better to arrive at a collective consciousness of this problem, which is both a kind of therapy and the basis for a struggle. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
804:around 1948 Simone de Beauvoir sought to meet Lacan while she was writing The Second Sex. She telephoned him and asked his advice on how to handle the subject. Flattered, he replied that it would take five or six months of interviews to disentangle things. Not wanting to devote so much time to finalizing a book that was already extensively researched, de Beauvoir suggested four meetings. Lacan refused. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
805:Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself & in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying, & human existence is indistinguishable from an absurd vegetation; a life justifies itself only if its effort to perpetuate itself is integrated into its surpassing & if this surpassing has no other limits than those which the subject assigns himself. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
806:Si, bien avant la puberté, et parfois même dès sa toute petite enfance, elle nous apparaît déjà comme sexuellement specifiée, ce n'est pas que de mystérieux instincts immédiatement la vouent à la passivité, à la coquetterie, à la maternité, c'est que lintervention d'autrui dans la vie de l'enfant et presque originelle et que dès ses premières années sa vocation lui est impérieusement insufflée. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
807:A life is such a strange object, at one moment translucent, at another utterly opaque, an object I make with my own hands, an object imposed on me, an object for which the world provides the raw material and then steals it from me again, pulverized by events, scattered, broken, scored yet retaining its unity; how heavy it is and how inconsistent: this contradiction breeds many misunderstandings. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
808:Eating, sleeping, cleaning - the years no longer rise up toward heaven, they lie spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won. Washing, ironing, sweeping, ferreting out rolls of lint from under wardrobes - all this halting of decay is also the denial of life; for time simultaneously creates and destroys, and only its negative aspect concerns the housekeeper. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
809:Nenhuma mulher escreveu o Processo, Moby Dick ou os Sete Pilares da Sabedoria. Elas não contestam a condição humana, porque mal começam a assumi-la integralmente. É o que explica porque razão as suas obras carecem de ressonâncias metafísicas e também de humor negro; elas não põem o mundo entre parênteses, não lhe fazem perguntas, não denunciam as contradições: levam-no a sério ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
810:Vous êtes tellement jeune! a-t-elle ajouté.
On me dit ça souvent, et me sens flattée. Soudain, le mot m'a agacée. C'est un compliment ambigu qui annonce de pénibles lendemains. Garder de la vitalité, de la gaieté, de la présence d'esprit, c'est rester jeune. Donc, le lot de la vieillesse c'est de la routine, la morosité, le gâtisme. Je ne suis pas jeune, je suis bien conservée. C'est different. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
811:[Woman] is simply what man decrees; thus she is called "the sex," by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex -- absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute -- she is the Other. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
812:We can reorient science - for example, a kind of medicine much more directed toward the enormous number of women's health problems which are neglected now. But the original givens of this science are the same for men and for women. Women simply have to steal the instrument; they don't have to break it, or try, a priori, to make of it something totally different. Steal it and use it for their own good. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
813:she gives birth in pain, she heals males' wounds, she nurses the newborn and buries the dead; of man she knows all that offends his pride and humiliates his will. While inclining before him and submitting flesh to spirit, she remains on the carnal borders of the spirit; and she contests the sharpness of hard masculine architecture by softening the angles; she introduces free luxury and unforeseen grace. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
814:As razões práticas invocadas contra o aborto legal não têm qualquer peso; quanto às razões morais, reduzem-se ao velho argumento católico: o feto possui uma alma a que se veda o paraíso, suprimindo-o antes do baptismo. É de observar que a igreja autoriza, ocasionalmente, a morte de homens feitos: nas guerras ou quando se trata de condenados à morte; reserva, porém, para o feto, um humanitarismo intransigente. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
815:Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
816:High as it may be, the number of victims is always measurable; and each one taken one by one is never anything but an individual: yet, through time and space, the triumph of the cause embraces the infinite, it interests the whole collectivity. In order to deny the outrage it is enough to deny the importance of the individual, even though it be at the cost of this collectivity: it is everything, he is only a zero. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
817:Misogynists have often reproached intellectual women for 'letting themselves go'; but they also preach to them: if you want to be our equals, stop wearing makeup and polishing your nails. This advice is absurd. Precisely because the idea of femininity is artificially defined by customs and fashion, it is imposed on every woman from the outside[...]. The individual is not free to shape the idea of femininity at will. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
818:Françoise could not help taking a surreptitious glance at Xavière: she gave a start of amazement. Xavière was no longer watching, her head was lowered. Françoise barely suppressed a scream. The girl was pressing the lighted end against her skin, a bitter smile curling her lips. It was an intimate, solitary smile, like that of a half-wit; the voluptuous, tortured smile of a woman possessed of some secret pleasure. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
819:Simone de Beauvoir llamaba mujeres pelota a aquellas que, tras triunfar con grandes dificultades en la sociedad machista, se prestaban a ser utilizadas por esa misma sociedad para reforzar la discriminación; y así, su imagen era rebotada contra las demás mujeres con el siguiente mensaje: «¿Veis? Ella ha triunfado porque vale; si vosotras no lo conseguís no es por impedimentos sexistas, sino porque no valéis lo suficiente.» ~ Rosa Montero, #NFDB
820:I've always been keenly aware of the passing of time. I've always thought that I was old. Even when I was twelve, I thought it was awful to be thirty. I felt that something was lost. At the same time, I was aware of what I could gain, and certain periods of my life have taught me a great deal. But, in spite of everything, I've always been haunted by the passing of time and by the fact that death keeps closing in on us. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
821:The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
822:To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God's absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, & his victories as well. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
823:Le sens de la toilette féminine est manifest: il s'agit de se 'parer' et se parer c'est s'offrir; les feministes hétérosexuelles se sont montrées naguère sur ce point aussi intransiseantes que les lesbiennes: elles refusaient de faire d'elles-même une marchandise qu'on exhibem elles adoptaient des tailleurs et des feutres secs; les robes ornées, décolletées leurs semblaient le symbole de l'ordre social qu'elles combattaient. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
824:Svakoj ženi bez razlike nije dato da bude posrednik između muškarca i sveta. Muškarac se ne zadovoljava samo time da u partnerki pronađe seksualne organe koje dopunjavaju njegove. Potrebno je da ona oličava čudesni procvat života i da u isto vreme prikriva njegove mutne tajne. Od nje će, pre svega, tražiti mladost i zdravlje, jer grleći nešto živo muškarac ne može da se očara ako ne zaboravi da je čitav život ispunjen smrću. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
825:How even I, “a dutiful daughter,” as Simone de Beauvoir once described her young self, was living a life so different from my mother’s; when she was my age she was married, about to become pregnant with me. I was beginning to think that this habit of mind—constantly tracing myself back to my mother, to where she’d begun and left off—wasn’t idiosyncratic, but something that many if not most women did, a feature of the female experience. ~ Kate Bolick, #NFDB
826:Woman has ovaries and a uterus; such are the particular conditions that lock her in her subjectivity; some even say she thinks with her hormones. Man vainly forgets that his anatomy also contains hormones and testicles. He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world that he believes he apprehends in all objectivity, whereas he considers woman's body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that particularizes it. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
827:Así, todo esfuerzo del hombre por establecer una relación con el infinito es vana. No puede entrar en relación con Dios, sino a través de la humanidad, y en la humanidad, no alcanza jamás sino a ciertos hombres, y no puede crear sino situaciones limitadas. Si sueña con dilatarse al infinito, se pierde rápidamente. Se pierde en sueños pues, de hecho, no deja de estar ahí, de testimoniar por sus proyectos infinitos su presencia finita. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
828:Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
829:Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
830:There is the problem of unpaid labor, such as housework, which represents millions and millions of unsalaried work hours and on which masculine society is firmly based. To put an end to this would be to send the present-day capitalist system flying in a single blow. Only we can't do it by ourselves; there have to be other kinds of attacks on the system. So a certain alliance with revolutionary systems is necessary, even masculine ones. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
831:It is that they lack the concrete means to organize themselves into a unit that could posit itself in opposition. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and unlike the proletariat, they have no solidarity of labor or interests; they even lack their own space… They live disbursed among men, tied by homes, work, economic interests, and social conditions to certain men- fathers or husbands- more closely than to other women. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
832:The terms masculine and feminine are
used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal
papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite
like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the
positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of
man to designate human beings in general ; whereas woman
represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without
reciprocity. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
833:It was a lovely autumn day with a blue sky: I made my way through a lead-coloured world, and I realized that my mother’s accident was affecting me far more than I had thought it would. I could not really see why. It had wrenched her out of the framework, the role, the set of images in which I had imprisoned her: I recognized her in this patient in bed, but I did not recognize either the pity or the kind of disturbance that she aroused in me. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
834:Men’s economic privilege, their social value, the prestige of marriage, the usefulness of masculine support—all these encourage women to ardently want to please men. They are on the whole still in a state of serfdom. It follows that woman knows and chooses herself not as she exists for herself but as man defines her. She thus has to be described first as men dream of her since her being-for-men is one of the essential factors of her concrete condition. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
835:it is only on posters and in advertisement pages that Americans have those chubby cheeks, expanding smiles, smooth looks, and faces flushed with well-being. In fact, almost all are at odds with themselves; drink offers a remedy for this inner malady of which boredom is the most usual sign: as drinking is accepted by society, it does not appear as a sign of their [Americans'] inability to adapt themselves; it is rather the adapted form of inadaptability. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
836:And yet we are told that femininity is in danger; we are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women. It would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity. Is this attribute something secreted by the ovaries? Or is it Platonic essence, a product of the philosophic imagination? Is a rustling petticoat enough to bring it down to earth? ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
837:It was an odd experience, this bringing to life of pages born of my pen and forgotten. From time to time they interested me -- they surprised me as much as if someone else had written them; yet I recognized the vocabulary, the shape of the sentences, the drive, the elliptical forms, the mannerisms. These pages were soaked through and through with my self -- there was a sickening intimacy about it, like the smell of a bedroom in which one has been shut up too long. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
838:N'importe quoi pouvait donc m'arriver, comme à n'importe qui : quelle révolution! C'est tellement étonnant d'être soi, justement soi, c'est si radicalement unique, qu'on a peine à se persuader que cette singularité se rencontre chez tout le monde et qu'on relève des statistiques. Maladie, accident, malheur, ça n'arrive jamais qu'aux autres : mais sous les yeux des curieux, l'autre brusquement, c'était moi; comme tous les autres, j'étais pour tous les autres une autre. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
839:depopulates it. Nothing exists outside of his stubborn project; therefore nothing can induce him to modify his choices. And having involved his whole life with an external object which can continually escape him, he tragically feels his dependence. Even if it does not definitely disappear, the object never gives itself. The passionate man makes himself a lack of being not that there might be being, but in order to be. And he remains at a distance; he is never fulfilled. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
840:Place Saint-Sulpice, la main dans la main de ma tante Marguerite qui ne savait pas très bien me parler, je me suis demandé soudain: "Comment me voit-elle?" et j'éprouvai un sentiment aigu de supériorité : car je connaissais mon for intérieur, et elle l'ignorait; trompée par les apparences, elle ne doutait pas, voyant mon corps inachevé, qu'au-dedans de moi rien ne manquait; je me promis, lorsque je serais grande, de ne pas oublier qu'on est à cinq ans un individu complet. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
841:A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
842:Un individuo che in presenza di testimoni ne chiami un altro «sporco negro», o che faccia stampare frasi ingiuriose nei confronti degli ebrei o degli arabi, può essere processato, e sarà condannato dai tribunali per «ingiurie razziali». Ma se un uomo grida pubblicamente a una donna «puttana» o se nei suoi scritti accusa la Donna di essere perfida, sciocca, volubile, ritardata mentale, di comportarsi da isterica, non corre alcun rischio. La nozione di «ingiurie sessiste» non esiste. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
843:The father's life is surrounded by mysterious prestige: the hours he spends in the home, the room where he works, the objects around him, his occupations, his habits, have a sacred character. It is he who feeds the family, is the one in charge and the head. Usually he works outside the home, and it is through him that the household communicates with the rest of the world: he is the embodiment of this adventurous, immense, difficult, and marvelous world; he is transcendence, he is God. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
844:she was flighty and poor, a French studies major who quoted Simone de Beauvoir. She wiped her runny nose on her coat sleeve when it was snowing, stuck her head out of car windows the way dogs do, the wind fireworking her hair. That woman was gone now. Not that it was her fault. Vast fortunes did that to people. It took them to the cleaners, cruelly starched and steam-pressed them so all their raw edges, all the dirt and hunger and guileless laughter, were ironed out. Few survived real money. ~ Marisha Pessl, #NFDB
845:And it’s the same thing everywhere all the time whether they’re stuffing themselves with chips paella or pizza it’s the same crew a filthy crew the rich who trample over you the poor who hate you for your money the old who dodder the young who sneer the men who show off the women who open their legs. I’d rather stay at home reading a thriller although they’ve become so dreary nowadays. The TV too what a clapped-out set of fools! I was made for another planet altogether I mistook the way. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
846:The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
847:Most feminists in France came to feminism after '68 as a result of the hypocrisy they experienced in leftist movements. In these movements, where everyone believed there was going to be true equality, fraternity between men and women, and that together they were going to struggle against this rotten society, even there they noticed that the leftists, the militants, kept them "in their place." Women made the coffee while the others did the talking; they were the ones who typed the letters. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
848:The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; so to say it is ambiguous is to assert that it's meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure & outrageousness, to save his existence. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
849:Of all these myths none is more firmly anchored in masculine hearts than that of the feminine "mystery". It has numerous advantages. And first of all it permits an easy explanation of all that appears inexplicable; the man who "does not understand" a woman is happy to substitute an objective resistance for a subjective deficiency of mind; instead of admitting his ignorance, he perceives the presence of a "mystery" outside himself; an alibi, indeed, that flatters laziness and vanity at once. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
850:Comment dans la condition féminine peut s'accomplir un être humain ? Quelles voies lui sont ouvertes ? Lesquelles aboutissent à des impasses ? Comment retrouver l'indépendance au sein de la dépendance ? Quelles circonstances limites la liberté de la femme et peut-elles les dépasser ? Ce sont là les questions fondamentales que nous voudrions élucider. C'est dire que nous inteéressant aux chances de l'individu, nous ne définirons pas ces chances en termes de bonheur, mais en termes de liberté. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
851:I quickly realized that friendships without tomorrows, and the little anguishes of parting, were part of the pleasures of traveling. I resolutely avoided bores, saw only those who amused me. We spent afternoons taking long walks, nights drinking and talking, and then we would leave each other, never to meet again, and there were no regrets. How simple life was. No regrets, no obligations, my acts and gestures counted for nothing, no one asked my advice, and I knew no other rule but my whims. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
852:No mirar demasiado lejos. A lo lejos estaban los horrores de la muerte y de los adioses, (...) la esterilidad mental, la soledad en un mundo extrañoque ya no comprenderemos más y que continuará a su curso sin nosotros. ¿Lograré no alzar la vista hacia esos horizontes? ¿O aprenderé a percibirlos sin espanto? Estamos juntos. Esa es nuestra posibilidad. Nos ayudaremos a a vivir esta última aventura de la cual no regresaremos. ¿Eso nos volverá más tolerante? No sé. Esperemos. No tenemos elección. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
853:Vid sidan av varje individs anspråk på att hävda sig som subjekt, vilket är ett etiskt anspråk, finns det i själva verket också inom individen en frestelse att undfly friheten och bli till ett ting. Det är en ödesdiger väg eftersom den innebär att individen är passiv, alienerad, förlorad och därmed offer för främmande viljor, avskuren från sin transcendens, berövad alla värden. Men det är också en lätt väg, eftersom man därigenom undviker den autentiskt levda existensens ångest och anspänning. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
854: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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
855:Les héroïnes de Laclos, de Stendhal, de Hemingway sont sans mystère: elles n'en sont pas moins attachantes. Reconnaître dans la femme un être humain, ce n'est pas appauvrir l'expérience de l'homme: celle-ci ne perdrait rien de sa diversité, de sa richesse, de son intensité si elle s'assumait dans son intersubjectivité; refuser les mythes, ce n'est pas détruire toute relation dramatique entre les sexes [...] c'est seulement demander que conduites, sentiments, passions soient fondés dans la vérité. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
856:[les femmes] ne se posent pas authentiquement comme Sujet […] C’est qu’elles n’ont pas les moyens concrets de se rassembler en une communauté qui se poserait en s’opposant. Elles n’ont pas de passé, d’histoire, de religion qui leur soit propre ; elles n’ont pas comme les prolétaires une solidarité de travail et d’intérêts ; il n’y a pas même entre elles cette promiscuité spatiale qui fait des Noirs d’Amérique, des Juifs des Ghettos, des ouvriers de Saint-Denis ou des usines Renault une communauté […] ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
857:Woman is not a fixed reality but a becoming; she has to be compared with man in her becoming; that is, her possibilities have to be defined: what skews the issues so much is that she is being reduced to what she was, to what she is today, while the question concerns her capacities; the fact is that her capacities manifest themselves clearly only when they have been realized: but the fact is also that when one considers a being who is transcendence and surpassing, it is never possible to close the books. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
858:Parents still bring up their daughters with a view to marriage rather than to furthering her personal development; she sees so many advantages in it that she herself wishes for it; the result is that she is often less specially trained, less solidly grounded than her brothers, she is less deeply involved in her profession. In this way she dooms herself to remain in it its lower level, to be inferior; and the vicious circle is formed : this professional inferiority reinforces her desire to find a husband. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
859:The comradeship that welded our lives together made a superfluous mockery of any other bond we might have forged for ourselves.What, for instance, was the point of living under the same roof when the whole world was our common property?Why fear to set great distances between us when we could never truly be parted?One single aim fired us, the urge to embrace all experience, and to bear witness concerning it ...That which bound us freed us and in this freedom we found ourselves bound as closely as possible ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
860:Of all these myths, none is more firmly anchored masculine hearts than that of the feminine
'mystery'. It has numerous advantages. And first of all it permits an easy explanation of all that
appears inexplicable; the man who ‘’does not understand’’ a woman is happy to substitute an
objective resistance for a subjective deficiency of mind; instead of admitting his ignorance, he
perceives the presence of a 'mystery' outside himself; an alibi, indeed, that flatters laziness and
vanity at once. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
861:Thus, the triumph of patriarchy was neither an accident nor the result of a violent revolution. From the origins of humanity, their biological privilege enabled men to affirm themselves alone as sovereign subjects; they never abdicated this privilege; they alienated part of their existence in Nature and in Woman; but they won it back afterward; condemned to play the role of the Other, woman was thus condemned to possess no more than precarious power: slave or idol, she was never the one who chose her lot. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
862:Art reveals the transitory as an absolute; & as the transitory existence is perpetuated through the centuries, art too, through the centuries, must perpetuate this never-to-be-finished revelation. Thus, the constructive activities of man tale a valid meaning only when they are assumed as a movement toward freedom; & reciprocally, one sees that such a movement is concrete: discoveries, inventions, industries, culture, painting, & books people the world concretely & open possibilities to men. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
863:Men create their own gods and thus have some slight understanding that they are self-fabricated. Women are much more susceptible, because they are completely oppressed by men; they take men at their word and believe in the gods that men have made up. The situation of women, their culture, makes them kneel more often before the gods that have been created by men than men themselves do, who know what they've done. To this extent, women will be more fanatical, whether it is for fascism or for totalitarianism. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
864:Thus we can regard the phenomenon of reproduction as founded in the very nature of being. But we must stop there. The perpetuation of the species does not necessitate sexual differentiation. True enough, this differentiation is characteristic of existents to such an extent that it belongs in any realistic definition of existence. But it nevertheless remains true that both a mind without a body and an immortal man are strictly inconceivable, whereas we can imagine a parthenogenetic or hermaphroditic society. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
865:Carla Hesse has given us an astonishing new look at women's struggle for independent expression and moral autonomy during the French Revolution and afterward. Denied the political and civil rights of men, literary women plunged into the expanded world of publication, answering the men's philosophical treatises with provocative novels about women's choices and chances. Lively and learned, The Other Enlightenment links women from Madame de Stael to Simone de Beauvoir in an alternate and daring path to the modern. ~ Natalie Zemon Davis, #NFDB
866:To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other...when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
867:The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength -each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
868:The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength, each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
869:Je profitais passionnément du privilège de l'enfance pour qui la beauté, le luxe, le bonheur sont des choses qui se mangent; devant les confiseries, je me pétrifiais, fascinée par l'éclat lumineux des fruits confits, le sourd chatoiement des pâtes de fruits, la floraison bigarrée des bonbons acidulés; vert, rouge, orange, violet: je convoitais les couleurs elles-mêmes autant que le plaisir qu'elles me promettaient. Le rose des bonbons se dégradait en nuances exquises: je plongeais ma cuillère dans un coucher de soleil. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
870:From man's point of view adopted by both male and female psychoanalysts - behavior of alienation is considered feminine, and behavior where the subject posits his transcendence is considered masculine. Donaldson, a historian of woman, observed that the definitions "the man is a male human being, the woman is a female human being" were asymmetrically mutilated; psychoanalysts in particular define man as a human being and woman as a female: every time she acts like a human being, the woman is said to be imitating the male. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
871:Obviously, everything has always been defined by the dominant ideology. But the dominant ideology has been able to accept women's literature as well as men's literature. I would say that women have been hindered from creating for a variety of reasons, as Virginia Woolf so admirably explained in A Room of One's Own. When they have created, on the whole they have been recognized. In literature it hasn't been nearly as oppressive as in, say, painting, where even the existence of so many women painters has always been denied. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
872:Die Krankheit hatte den Panzer ihrer Vorurteile und ihrer Ansprüche gesprengt; vielleich, weil sie diese Art Selbstschutz nicht mehr brauchte. Von Verzicht, von Aufopferung war keine Rede mehr: ihre Vornehmste Pflicht war, wieder gesund zu werden, das heißt, sich um sich zu kümmern; da sie sich ohne Bedenken ihren Wünschen und ihren Freuden überließ, war sie endlich von der Verbitterung befreit. Ihre Schönheit, ihr Lächeln kehrten zurück und drückten auf diesem Totenlager eine stille Selbstzufriedenheit, eine Art Glück aus. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
873:when an individual or a group of individuals is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he or they are inferior. But the scope of the verb to be must be understood; bad faith means giving it a substantive value, when in fact it has the sense of the Hegelian dynamic: to be is to have become, to have been made as one manifests oneself. Yes, women in general are today inferior to men; that is, their situation provides them with fewer possibilities: the question is whether this state of affairs must be perpetuated. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
874:Adesso cercavo di sdoppiarmi per osservarmi, per spiarmi; nel mio diario dialogavo con me stessa. Entrai in un mondo che mi stordì per la sua novità. Appresi ciò che separa la tristezza dalla malinconia, l'aridità dalla serenità; appresi le esitazioni e i deliri del sentimento, lo splendore delle grandi rinunce e i mormorii sotterranei della speranza. Mi esaltavo, come nelle serate in cui contemplavo il cielo cangiante dietro le montagne azzurre; io ero il paesaggio e lo sguardo: non esistevo che in me stessa e per me stessa. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
875:The thing that attracted me about philosophy was that it went straight to essentials. I had never liked fiddling detail; I perceived the general significance of things rather than their singularities, and I preferred understanding to seeing; I had always wanted to know everything; philosophy would allow me to appease this desire, for it aimed at total reality;philosophy went right to the heart of truth and revealed to me, instead of an illusory whirlwind of facts or empirical laws, an order, a reason, a necessity in everything. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
876:Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
877:There was only one hope left to me - Andre. But could he fill this emptiness within me? Had he loved me as I loved him? At the beginning I think he did; or rather the question never arose of either of us, for we were so happy together. But when his work no longer satisfied him, did he come to the conclusion that our love was not enough for him? Did it disappoint him? I think he looks upon me as a mathematical constant whose disappearance would take him very much aback without in any way altering his destiny, since the heart of the matter lies elsewhere. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
878:I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where i slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
879:Así, pues, el triunfo del patriarcado no fue ni azar ni el resultado de una revolución violenta. Desde el origen de la Humanidad, su privilegio biológico ha permitido a los varones afirmarse exclusivamente como sujetos soberanos; jamás han abdicado de ese privilegio; en parte han alienado su existencia en la Naturaleza y en la mujer; pero en seguida la han reconquistado; condenada a representar el papel del Otro, la mujer estaba igualmente condenada a no poseer más que un poder precario: esclava o ídolo, jamás ha sido ella misma quien ha elegido su suerte. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
880:The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
881:Hätten Sie nicht den Glauben verloren, dann würde der Tod Sie nicht derart erschrecken", schrieben mir fromme Seelen mit hämischem Mitgefühl. Wohlwollende Leser redeten mir gut zu: "Verschwinden bedeutet nichts; Ihr Werk wird bleiben." Und in Gedanken antwortete ich ihnen allen, daß sie sich täuschten. Die Religion konnte für meine Mutter ebensowenig leisten wie für mich die Hoffnung auf einen Erfolg nach dem Tode. Ob man sich die Unsterblichkeit als eine himmlische oder eine irdische vorstellt – solange man am Leben hängt, tröstet sie nicht über den Tod hinweg. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
882:Mais en fait les voix féminines se taisent là où commence l'action concrète; elles ont pu susciter des guerres, non suggérer la tactique d'une bataille; elles n'ont guère orienté la politique que dans la mesure où la politique se réduisait à l'intrigue: les vraies commandes du monde n'ont jamais été aux mains des femmes; elles n'ont pas agi sur les techniques ni sur l'économie, elles n'ont pas fait ni défait des États, elles n'ont pas découvert des mondes. C'est par elles que certains événements ont été déclenchés: mais elles ont été prétextes beaucoup plus qu'agents. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
883:The truth is that just as - biologically - males and females are never victims of one another but both victims of the species, so man and wife together undergo the oppression of an institution they did not create. If it is asserted that men oppress women, the husband is indignant; he feels that he is the one who is oppressed - and he is; but the fact is that it is the masculine code, it is the society developed by the males and in their interest, that has established woman's situation in a form that is at present a source of torment for both sexes. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
884:There is something false in this search for a purely feminine writing style. Language, such as it is, is inherited from a masculine society, and it contains many male prejudices. We must rid language of all that. Still, a language is not something created artificially; the proletariat can't use a different language from the bourgeoisie, even if they use it differently, even if from time to time they invent something, technical words or even a kind of worker's slang, which can be very beautiful and very rich. Women can do that as well, enrich their language, clean it up. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
885:On the evenings when my parents held parties, the drawing-room mirrors multiplied to infinity the scintillations of a crystal chandelier. Mama would take her seat at the grand piano to accompany a lady dressed in a cloud of tulle who played the violin and a cousin who performed on a cello. I would crack between my teeth the candied shell of an artificial fruit, and a burst of light would illuminate my palate with a taste of blackcurrant or pineapple: all the colours, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held the whole party in my mouth. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
886:Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity. The evil all arose from the fact that he had increased his needs rather than limited them; . . . As long as fresh needs continued to be created, so new frustrations would come into being. When had the decline begun? The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution - not a social or political revolution - only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
887:Lo que sobre todo me atrajo de la filosofía fue que suponía que iba derecha a lo esencial. Nunca me habían gustado los detalles, veía el sentido global de las cosas más que sus singularidades y prefería comprender a ver; yo siempre había deseado conocerlo todo; la filosofía me permitiría alcanzar ese deseo, pues apuntaba a la totalidad de lo real; se instalaba en seguida en su corazón y me revelaba en vez de un decepcionante torbellino de hechos o de leyes empíricas un orden, una razón, una necesidad. Ciencias, literatura, todas las otras disciplinas me parecieron parientes pobres. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
888:Je suis trop intelligente, trop exigeante et trop riche pour que personne puisse se charger de moi entièrement. Personne ne me connaît ni ne m'aime tout entière. Je n'ai que moi.
Il ne faut pas que j'essaie de tromper cette solitude en renonçant à ce que je peux seule porter. Il faut que je vive, sachant que personne ne m'aidera à vivre. Ma force, c'est que je m'estime aussi haut que n'importe quel autrui ; je peux bien envier à l'un ou l'autre telle qualité ; de personne la valeur ne me semble dépasser la mienne : je possède autant. Seule je vivrai, forte de ce que je sais être. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
889:El
día en que a la mujer le sea posible amar con su fuerza, no con su debilidad, no para huirse,
sino para hallarse, no para destituirse, sino para afirmarse, entonces el amor será para ella,
como para el hombre, fuente de vida y no de mortal peligro. Mientras tanto, resume en su
figura más patética la maldición que pesa sobre la mujer encerrada en el universo femenino, la
mujer mutilada, incapaz de bastarse a sí misma. Las innumerables mártires del amor son un
testimonio contra la injusticia de un destino que les propone como última salvación un estéril
infierno ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
890:La emancipación de la mujer requiere una revolución profunda y no puede realizarse sin violencia, pues los hombres se aprovechan de la sociedad patriarcal y están aferrados a ella. Las mujeres se verán obligadas a responder a la violencia con violencia; los hombres las agreden, las insultan por la calle, les pegan y las hieren en sus casas, las violan y todo ello ocurre al amparo de las vetustas leyes que hay que revisar.
Las mujeres agredidas por los hombres deben defenderse también mediante la violencia. Algunas aprenden karate u otras formas de lucha. Estoy completamente de acuerdo". ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
891:Sartre è ideologicamente un creatore, io no; costretto da questo a delle scelte politiche, lui ne ha approfondito le cause piú di quanto a me non interessasse farlo: avrei tradito la mia libertà se avessi rifiutato di riconoscere questa sua superiorità; mi sarei ostinata nell’atteggiamento di sfida e di malafede frutto della lotta dei sessi, che è proprio il contrario dell’onestà intellettuale. Ho salvaguardato la mia indipendenza perché non ho mai scaricato su Sartre le mie responsabilità; non ho aderito a nessuna idea, non ho preso nessuna risoluzione senza averla prima criticata e fatta mia. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
892:We have to respect freedom only when it is intended for freedom, not when it strays, flees itself, and resigns itself. A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
893:The thing I understood least of all was that knowledge led to despair and damnation. Our spiritual mentor had not said that those bad books had given a false picture of life: if that had been the case, he could easily have exposed their falsehood; the tragedy of the little girl whom he had failed to bring to salvation was that she had made a premature discovery of the true nature of reality. Well, anyhow, I thought, I shall discover it myself one day, and it isn’t going to kill me: the idea that there was a certain age when knowledge of the truth could prove fatal I found offensive to common sense. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
894:How could van Gogh have been born woman? A woman would not have been sent on mission to Boringe, she would not have felt men's misery as her own crime, she would not have sought redemption; so she would never have painted van Gogh's sunflowers. And this without taking into account that the painter's kind of life - the solitude in Arles, going to cafés, whorehouses, everything that feed into van Gogh's art by feeding his sensibility - would have been prohibited to her. A woman could never have become Kafka: in her doubts and anxieties, she would never have recognised the anguish of Man driven from paradise. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
895:PRESIDENTE: Poiché lei parte dal principio della libertà di ciascuno sul suo corpo, applicando lo stesso principio, lei ritiene che i poteri pubblici devono lasciare alla gente la completa libertà di drogarsi?
SIGNORA DE BEAUVOIR: Questo non rientra nella nostra questione.
PRESIDENTE: Lei ammette tuttavia qualche riserva su questo.
SIGNORA DE BEAUVOIR: Sarei del parere di lasciare le persone libere di drogarsi se lo vogliono, ma dando loro informazioni sufficienti sulla droga. Bisognerebbe che le persone fossero informate e anche consigliate: in queste condizioni, sí, che venga loro lasciata la libertà. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
896:an enormous round egg snatching and castrating the agile sperm;
monstorous and stuffed, the queen termite reigning over the servile
males; the praying mantis and the spider, gorged on love, crushing
their partners and gobbling them up; the dog in heat running through
back alleys, leaving perverse smells in her wake; the monkey showing
herself off brazenly, sneaking away with flirtatious hypocrisy. And
the most splendid wildcats, the tigress, lioness, and panther, lie
down slavishly under the male’s imperial embrace, inert, impatient,
shrewd, stupid, insensitive, lewd, fierce, and humiliated ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
897:In our opinion, there is no public good other than one that assures the citizens' private good; we judge institutions from the point of view of the concrete opportunities they give to individuals. But neither do we confuse the idea of private interest with happiness[...]. We cannot really know what the word 'happiness' means, and still less what authentic values it covers; there is no way to measure the happiness of others, and it is always easy to call a situation that one would like to impose on others happy: in particular, we declare happy those condemned to stagnation, under the pretext that happiness is immobility. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
898:Enforced maternity brings into the world wretched infants, whom their parents will be unable to support and who will become the victims of public care or ‘child martyrs’. It must be pointed out that our society, so concerned to defend the rights of the embryo, shows no interest in the children once they are born; it prosecutes the abortionists instead of undertaking to reform that scandalous institution known as ‘public assistance’; those responsible for entrusting the children to their torturers are allowed to go free; society closes its eyes to the frightful tyranny of brutes in children’s asylums and private foster homes. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
899:As Merleau Ponty very justly puts it, man is not a natural species: he's a historical idea. Woman is not a completed reality, but rather a becoming, and it is in her becoming that she should be compared with man; that is to say, her possibilities should be defined. What gives rise to much of the debate is the tendency to reduce her to what she has been, to what she is today, in raising the question of her capabilities; for the fact is that capabilities are clearly manifested only when they are realized - but the fact is also that when we have to do with a being whose nature is transcendent action, we can never close the books. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
900:Aos cinquenta anos, suas roupas lhe pareciam ou tristes demais ou muito alegres. Agora, ela sabia o que lhe era permitido ou proibido, e se vestia sem preocupação. Sem prazer também. Aquela relação íntima, quase terna, que antes tinha com suas roupas não existia mais. Nicole pendurou seu tailleur no armário: e, apesar de tê-lo usado durante dois anos, era-lhe agora um objeto indiferente, impessoal, no qual não encontrava mais nada de si. Enquanto isso, Macha sorria diante do espelho, não por causa da bela blusa que experimentava, mas por uma imagem que concebia de sia mesma, inesperada e sedutora. É, eu me lembro, pensou Nicole. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
901:Even when her rights are recognized abstractly, long-standing habit keeps them from being concretely manifested in customs. Economically, men and women almost form two castes; all things being equal, the former have better jobs, higher wages, and greater chances to succeed than their new female competitors; they occupy many more places in industry, in politics, and so forth, and they hold the most important positions. In addition to their concrete power, they are invested with a prestige whose tradition is reinforced by the child's whole education: the present incorporates the past, and in the past all history was made by males. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
902:There was once a man who lost his shadow. I forget what happened to him, but it was dreadful. As for me, I've lost my own image. I did not look at it often; but it was there, in the background, just as Maurice had drawn it for me. A straightforward, genuine, "authentic" woman, with out mean-mindedness, uncompromising, but at the same time understanding, indulgent, sensitive, deeply feeling, intensely aware of things and of people, passionately devoted to those she loved and creating happiness for them. A fine life, serene, full, "harmonious." It is dark: I cannot see myself anymore. And what do the others see? Maybe something hideous. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
903:From the origins of humanity, their biological privilege enabled men to affirm themselves alone as sovereign subjects; they never abdicated this privilege; they alienated part of their existence in Nature and in Woman; but they won it back afterward; condemned to play the role of the Other, woman was thus condemned to possess no more than precarious power: slave or idol, she was never the one who chose her lot. “Men make gods and women worship them,” said Frazer; it is men who decide if their supreme divinities will be females or males; the place of woman in society is always the one they assign her; at no time has she imposed her own law. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
904:L'attore elude i terrori della creazione, poiché gli si offre bell'e fatto un universo immaginario nel quale ha un posto riservato; si mette in carne e ossa di fronte a un pubblico di carne ed ossa; ridotto alla parte dello specchio, questo gli rimanda docilmente la sua immagine; sulla scena egli è sovrano ed esiste realmente: si sente veramente sovrano. Mio padre provava un piacere tutto particolare a truccarsi: attaccandosi parrucca e favoriti si faceva sparire, ed evitava in tal modo qualunque confronto. Né signore né plebeo, questa indeterminatezza diventava plasticità; avendo radicalmente cessato d'essere, egli diventava chiunque: li sorpassava tutti. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
905:The proletariat could plan to massacre the whole ruling class; a fanatic Jew or black could dream of seizing the secret of the atomic bomb and turning all of humanity entirely Jewish or entirely black: but a woman could not even dream of exterminating males. The tie that binds her to her oppressors is unlike any other. The division of the sexes is a biological given, not a moment in human history. Their opposition took shape within an original Mitsein, and she has not broken it. The couple is a fundamental unit with the two halves riveted to each other: terristic of woman: she is the Other at the heart of a whole whose two components are necessary to each other. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
906:Eles acabam comigo os calhordas. A tourada de amanhã me mata. Eu quero ganhar. Eu quero eu quero eu quero eu quero eu quero. Vou deitar cartas para mim. Não. Em caso de infelicidade eu me atiro pela janela eu não quero isso os deixaria eufóricos demais. Pensar em outra coisa. Em coisas alegres. O pequeno bordelês. Não esperávamos nada um do outro não nos fazíamos perguntas nem promessas nós nos metíamos na cama e nos amávamos. Durou três semanas e ele partiu para a África eu chorei chorei. É uma lembrança que me repousa. Essas coisas só acontecem uma vez na vida. Que pena! Quando penso nisso eu me digo que se tivessem sabido me amar eu teria sido a ternura em pessoa. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
907:L’oppressione delle donne è un fatto al quale la società è talmente abituata che, perfino coloro tra noi che la condannano nel suo insieme, in nome di principi democratici astratti, ne danno per scontati molti aspetti. Io stessa, avendo piú o meno interpretato il ruolo di donna-alibi, ho ritenuto a lungo che certi inconvenienti inerenti alla condizione femminile si dovessero semplicemente trascurare o sormontare, che non c’era bisogno di combatterli. Ciò che la nuova generazione di donne in rivolta mi ha fatto capire è che in questa faciloneria c’era complicità. In effetti, accettare tra i due sessi la minima disuguaglianza significa essere d’accordo sulla Disuguaglianza. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
908:The passionate man seeks possession; he seeks to attain being. The failure and the hell which he creates for himself have been described often enough. He causes certain rare treasures to appear in the world, but he also depopulates it. Nothing exists outside his stubborn project; therefore nothing can induce him to modify his choices. And having involved his whole life with an external object which can continually escape him, he tragically feels his dependence. Even if it does not definitely disappear, the object never gives itself. The passionate man makes himself a lack of being not that there might be being, but in order to be. And he remains at a distance; he is never fulfilled. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
909:[T]raveling, a local is shocked to realize that in neighboring countries locals view him as a foreigner; between villages, clans, nations, and classes there are wars, potlatches, agreements, treaties, and struggles that remove the absolute meaning from the idea of the 'other' and bring out its relativity; whether one likes it or not, individuals and groups have no choice but to recognize the reciprocity of their relation. How is it, then, that between the sexes this reciprocity has not been put forward, that one of the terms has been asserted as the only essential one, denying any relativity in regard to its correlative, defining the latter as pure alterity? Why do women not contest male sovereignty? ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
910:But if man is free to define for himself the conditions of a life which is valid in his own eyes, can he not choose whatever he likes and act however he likes? Dostoievsky asserted, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” Today’s believers use this formula for their own advantage. To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God’s absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, and his victories as well. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
911:I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life," said Simone de Beauvoir. "I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish….You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.''
I tend more to frustration than anger, but otherwise I know precisely what de Beauvoir means. I want twenty-four hours more in each day, and nine consecutive lives to live, for I am greedy for life and art as well, with all their occasionally conflicting demands. I want as much time as possible to continue to work hard and learn. I'm greedy for it all. ~ Terri Windling,#NFDB
912:Cada manhã, antes mesmo de abrir os olhos, ela reconhecia sua cama, seu quarto. Mas, às vezes, quando dormia de tarde, experimentava ao acordar aquela estupefação pueril: por que eu sou eu? Como se a consciência, emergindo despercebida do sono, hesitasse antes de se reencarnar. O que a surpreendia — como a criança quando toma consciência de sua própria identidade — era se encontrar no âmago de sua própria vida e não na de outra pessoa: por qual acaso? Ela poderia não ter nascido: então não teria havido questão. “Eu poderia ter sido uma outra, mas então teria sido uma outra que se interrogaria sobre si.” Isto lhe provocava a vertigem de sentir de uma só vez sua contingência e a necessária coincidência com sua história. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
913:The books I liked became a Bible from which I drew advice and support; I copied out long passages from them; I memorized new canticles and new litanies, psalms, proverbs, and prophecies, and I sanctified every incident in my life by the recital of these sacred texts. My emotions, my tears, and my hopes were no less sincere on account of that; the words and the cadences, the lines and the verses were not aids to make believe: but they rescued from silent oblivion all those intimate adventures of the spirit that I couldn’t speak to anyone about; they created a kind of communion between myself and those twin souls which existed somewhere out of reach; instead of living out my small private existence, I was participating in a great spiritual epic. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
914:The books I liked became a Bible from which I drew advice and support; I copied out long passages from them; I memorized new canticles and new litanies, psalms, proverbs, and prophecies, and I sanctified every incident in my life by the recital of these sacred texts. My emotions, my tears, and my hopes were no less sincere on account of that; the words and the cadences, the lines and the verses were not aids to make believe: but they rescued from silent oblivion all those intimate adventures of the spirit that I couldn't speak to anyone about; they created a kind of communion between myself and those twin souls which existed somewhere out of reach; instead of living out my small private existence, I was participating in a great spiritual epic. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
915:Battling racism and battling heterosexist and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer. None of these struggles are ever easy, and even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded, because it is so easy not to battle at all, to just accept and call that acceptance inevitable.
And all power is relative. Recognizing the existence as well as the limitations of my own power, and accepting the responsibility for using it in my own behalf, involve me in direct and daily actions that preclude denial as possible refuge. Simone de Beauvoir’s words echo in my head: “It is in the recognition of the genuine conditions of our lives that we gain the strength to act and our motivation for change. ~ Audre Lorde,#NFDB
916:unlucky lover’s soul; while he is walking around Rome, a woman emerges at every turn of the page; by the regrets, desires, sadnesses, and joys women awakened in him, he came to know the nature of his own heart; it is women he wants as judges: he frequents their salons, he wants to shine; he owes them his greatest joys, his greatest pain, they were his main occupation; he prefers their love to any friendship, their friendship to that of men; women inspire his books, female figures populate them; he writes in great part for them. “I might be lucky enough to be read in 1900 by the souls I love, the Mme Rolands, the Mélanie Guilberts …” They were the very substance of his life. Where did this privilege come from? This tender friend of women—and precisely ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
917:Forced motherhood results in bringing miserable children into the world, children whose parents cannot feed them, who become victims of public assistance or "martyr children." It must be pointed out that the same society so determined to defend the rights of the fetus shows no interest in children after they are born; instead of trying to reform this scandalous institution called public assistance, society prosecutes abortionists; those responsible for delivering orphans to torturers are left free; society closes its eyes to the horrible tyranny practiced in "reform schools" or in the private homes of child abusers; and while it refuses to accept that the fetus belongs to the mother carrying it, it nevertheless agrees that the child is his parents' thing. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
918:Yet I loathe the thought of annihilating myself quite as much now as I ever did. I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. ... If it had at least enriched the earth; if it had given birth to… what? A hill? A rocket? But no. Nothing will have taken place. I can still see the hedge of hazel trees flurried by the wind and the promises with which I fed my beating heart while I stood gazing at the gold-mine at my feet: a whole life to live. The promises have all been kept. And yet, turning an incredulous gaze towards that young and credulous girl, I realise with stupor how much I was gypped. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
919:...ver cambiar el mundo es a la vez milagroso y desolador.
Reflexioné.
-Una vez mas te burlarás de mi optimismo: para mi es sobre todo milagroso.
-Pero también para mi. Lo desolador, cuando uno envejece, no está en la cosa sino en uno mismo.
-No me parece. Con eso también se pierde, pero se gana.
-Se pierde mucho más de lo que se gana. A decir verdad, no veo que es lo que se gana. ¿Podrias decírmelo?
-Es agradable tener detrás de si un largo pasado
-¿Crees que lo tienes? Para mi el mio. Trata de contármelo.
-Se que está allí. Da densidad al presente. "
"No mas proyecto. No más deseo. No escribiré más. ¿ entonces qué haré? Que vacío en mi, alrededor de mi. Inútil. (...) me preguntaba cómo se logra vivir cuando no se espera nada más de sí ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
920:Who can think of Larkin now without considering his fondness for the buttocks of schoolgirls and paranoid hatred of blacks … Or Eric Gill’s copulations with more or less every member of his family, including the dog? Proust had rats tortured, and donated his family furniture to brothels; Dickens walled up his wife and kept her from her children; Lillian Hellman lied. While Sartre lived with his mother, Simone de Beauvoir pimped babes for him; he envied Camus, before trashing him. John Cheever loitered in toilets, nostrils aflare, before returning to his wife. P.G. Wodehouse made broadcasts for the Nazis; Mailer stabbed his second wife. Two of Ted Hughes’s lovers had killed themselves. And as for Styron, Salinger, Saroyan … Literature was a killing field; no decent person had ever picked up a pen. ~ Hanif Kureishi, #NFDB
921:Sim, ela vai esquecer a igreja branca e dourada como tinha esquecido tantas outras. Aquela curiosidade que havia mantido quase intacta lhe parecia com frequência como uma sobrevivência obstinada: mas de que servia se as lembranças se reduzem a poeira? A lua brilhava, como a estrelinha que a acompanha fielmente, e Nicole se lembrou dos versos bonitos de Aucassin e Nicolette: “Estrelinha, eu te vi/ Que a lua traz a si.” Esta é a vantagem da literatura, pensou ela: nós guardamos as palavras conosco. As imagens murcham, deformam-se, apagam-se. Mas ela reencontrava as velhas palavras em suas cordas vocais, quase como foram escritas. As palavras os uniam aos séculos passados, quando os astros brilhavam exatamente como hoje. E esse renascimento e essa permanência lhe davam uma impressão de eternidade. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
922:Teriam eles trinta ou sessenta anos? Os cabelos de André ficaram brancos prematuramente: antes, isso era charmoso, a neve que realçava o frescor moreno de sua tez. E ainda o era. A pele havia engrossado e enrugado, como couro velho, mas os sorrisos da boca e dos olhos mantinham seu brilho. Apesar dos desmentidos do álbum de fotos, sua imagem jovem se curvara diante do seu rosto de hoje: para Nicole, ele não envelhecera nada.Certamente porque ele mesmo parecia ignorar que havia envelhecido. André, que no passado gostava tanto de correr, nadar, escalar e se olhar no espelho, agora exibia seus sessenta e quatro anos sem preocupações. Uma vida longa de risos, lágrimas, raivas, abraços, confissões, silêncios e emoções, e, às vezes, parece que o tempo não passou. O futuro ainda se estende ao infinito. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
923:Kadını kurtarmak, özgür kılmak, onu erkekle arasındaki ilintilerin daracık dünyasına kapatmamak demektir, yoksa bu ilintileri yadsımak değil; kadın, kendisi için var olmaya devam edecektir: iki cins de, hem birbirlerini özne olarak kabul edecek, hem de karşılarındaki varlık için başkası olarak kalacaktır; ilişkilerindeki karşılıklılık , insanoğullarının birbirinden ayrı iki kategoryaya bölünüşünün doğurduğu arzu, tutku, aşk, düş, serüven gibi mucizeleri yok etmeyecektir; ve hepimizi heyecanlandıran vermek, elde etmek, birleşmek gibi sözcükler yine aynı anlama gelecektir; insanlığın yarısının köleliği ve bunun getirdiği bütün o iki yüzlülük yok edildiği zaman ortaya çıkacaktır insanlık denen "varlık kesimi"nin gerçek anlamı ve yine ancak o zaman kadınla erkek arkadaşlığı gerçek yüzüne kavuşacaktır. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
924:To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other. The reciprocity of their relations will not do away with the miracles – desire, possession, love, dream, adventure – worked by the division of human beings into two separate categories; and the words that move us – giving, conquering, uniting – will not lose their meaning. On the contrary, when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
925:I've no personality,' I would tell myself. My curiosity embraced everything; I believed in an absolute truth, in the need for moral law; my thoughts adapted themselves to their objects; if occasionally one of them took me by surprise, it was because it reflected something that was surprising. I preferred good to evil and despised that which should be despised. I could find no trace of my own subjectivity. I had wanted myself to be boundless, and I had become as shapeless as the infinite. The paradox was that I became aware of this deficiency at the very moment when I discovered my individuality; my universal aspiration had seemed to me until then to exist in its own right; but now it had become a character trait: 'Simone is interested in everything.' I found myself limited by my refusal to be limited. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
926:The people of former times [...] they're dead that's the only thing they have over the living but in their own day they were just as sickening. Picturesqueness: I don't fall for that not for one minute. Stinking filthy dirty washing cabbage-stalks what a pretentious fool you have to be to go into such ecstasies over that! And it's the same thing everywhere all the time whether they're stuffing themselves with chips paella or pizza it's the same crew a filthy crew the rich who trample over you the poor who hate you for your money the old who dodder the young who sneer the men who show off the women who open their legs. I'd rather stay at home reading a thriller although they've become so dreary nowadays. The telly too what a clapped-out set of fools! I was made for another planet altogether I mistook the way. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
927:The category of Other is as original as consciousness itself. The duality between Self and Other can be found in the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies; the division did not always fall into the category of the division of the sexes (...) No group ever defines itself as One without immediately setting up the Other opposite itself. It only takes three travelers brought together by chance in the same train compartment for the rest of the travellers to become vaguely hostile 'others'. Village people view anyone not belonging to the village as suspicious 'others'. For the native of a country, inhabitants of other countries are viewed as 'foreigners'; Jews are the 'others' for anti-Semites, blacks for racist Americans, indigenous people for colonists, proletarians for the propertied classes. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
928:Ya no creo en Dios”, me dije sin gran asombro. Era una evidencia: de haber creído en él no hubiera aceptado alegremente ofenderlo. Siempre había pensado que frente al precio de la eternidad este mundo no contaba; contaba puesto que yo lo quería y de pronto el que no pesaba en la balanza era Dios: para eso era necesario que su nombre sólo sufriera un espejismo. Desde hacía tiempo la idea que me hacía de él se había depurado, sublimado, hasta el punto que había perdido todo rostro, todo lazo concreto con la tierra, y poco a poco el ser mismo. Su perfección excluía su realidad. Por eso me sorprendí tan poco cuando comprendí su ausencia en el corazón y en el cielo. No lo negué para liberarme de un importuno: por el contrario, advertí que ya no intervenía en mi vida y comprendí que había dejado de existir para mí. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
929:Sewers are necessary to guarantee the wholesomeness of palaces, according to the Fathers of the Church. And it has often been remarked that the necessity exists of sacrificing one part of the female sex in order to save the other and prevent worse troubles. One of the arguments in support of slavery, advanced by the American supporters of the institution, was that the Southern whites, being all freed from servile duties, could maintain the most democratic and refined relations among themselves; in the same way, a caste of 'shameless women' allows the 'honest woman' to be treated with the most chivalrous respect. The prostitute is a scapegoat; man vents his turpitude upon her, and he rejects her. Whether she is put legally under police supervision or works illegally in secret, she is in any case treated as a pariah. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
930:The more I get into it the more isolated I feel vis-à-vis the writers whom I consider to be of any serious mind... I am enclosing this article entitled New Heroes by Simone de Beauvoir...It is what I have been thinking at the bottom of my mind all this time and God knows it is difficult to write the way I do and yet think their way. This problem you will never have to face because you have always been a truly isolated person so that whatever you write will be good because it will be true which is not so in my case... You immediately receive recognition because what you write is in true relation to yourself which is always recognizable to the world outside... With me who knows? When you are capable only of a serious approach to writing as I am it is almost more than one can bear to be continually doubting one's sincerity... (citing Jane Bowles, 1947) ~ Chris Kraus, #NFDB
931:In fact, the sickness I was suffering from was that I had been driven out of the paradise of childhood and had not found my place in the world of adults. I had set myself up in the absolute in order to gaze down upon this world which was rejecting me; now, if I wanted to act, to write a book, to express myself, I would have to go back down there: but my contempt had annihilated it, and I could see nothing but emptiness. The fact is that I had not yet put my hand to the plow. Love, action, literary work: all I did was to roll these ideas round in my head; I was fighting in an abstract fashion against abstract possibilities, and I had come to the conclusion that reality was of the most pitiful insignificance. I was hoping to hold fast to something, and misled by the violence of this indefinite desire, I was confusing it with the desire for the infinite. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
932:Régine traversa le palier et descendit l'escalier silencieux où luisaient des bassinoires de cuivre ; elle avait horreur de s'endormir ; pendant qu'on dormait, il y avait toujours d'autres gens qui veillaient, et on n'avait plus aucune prise sur eux. Elle poussa la porte du jardin : une pelouse verte entourée d'allées de gravier et enserrée par quatre murs où grimpait une maigre vigne vierge. Elle s'étendit sur une chaise longue. L'homme n'avait pas cillé. Il ne semblait rien voir ni rien entendre. Je l'envie. Il ne sait pas que la terre est si vaste et la vie si courte ; il ne sait pas que d'autres gens existent. Il se satisfait de ce carré de ciel au-dessus de sa tête. Moi je voudrais que chaque chose m'appartienne comme si je n'aimais qu'elle au monde ; mais je les veux toutes ; et mes mains sont vides. Je l'envie. Il ignore sûrement ce qu'est l'ennui. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
933:The little girl’s sense of secrecy that developed at prepuberty only grows in importance. She closes herself up in fierce solitude: she refuses to reveal to those around her the hidden self that she considers to be her real self and that is in fact an imaginary character: she plays at being a dancer like Tolstoy’s Natasha, or a saint like Marie Leneru, or simply the singular wonder that is herself. There is still an enormous difference between this heroine and the objective face that her parents and friends recognise in her. She is also convinced that she is misunderstood: her relationship with herself becomes even more passionate: she becomes intoxicated with her isolation, feels different, superior, exceptional: she promises that the future will take revenge on the mediocrity of her present life. From this narrow and petty existence she escapes by dreams. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
934:These women are, quite simply, alive; they know that the source of true values is not in external things but in human hearts. This gives its charm to the world they live in: they banish ennui by the simple fact of their presence, with their dreams, their desires, their pleasures, their emotions, their ingenuities. The sanseverina, that 'active soul' dreads ennui more than death. To stagnate in ennui 'is to keep from dying, she said, not to live'; she is ' always impassioned over something, always in action and gay too '. Thoughtless, childish or profound, gay or grave, daring or secretive, they all reject the heavy sleep in which humanity is mired. And these women who have been able to maintain their liberty- empty as it has been- will rise through passion to heroism once they find an objective worthy of them; their spiritual power, their energy, suggest the fierce purity of total dedication ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
935:Women’s actions have never been more than symbolic agitation; they have won only what men have been willing to concede to them; they have taken nothing; they have received.5 It is that they lack the concrete means to organize themselves into a unit that could posit itself in opposition. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and unlike the proletariat, they have no solidarity of labor or interests; they even lack their own space that makes communities of American blacks, the Jews in ghettos, or the workers in Saint-Denis or Renault factories. They live dispersed among men, tied by homes, work, economic interests, and social conditions to certain men—fathers or husbands—more closely than to other women. As bourgeois women, they are in solidarity with bourgeois men and not with women proletarians; as white women, they are in solidarity with white men and not with black women. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
936:As for woman, her inferiority complex manifests itself in a rejection out of shame of her femininity: it is not the absence of a penis that unleashes this complex but the total situation; the girl envies the phallus only as a symbol of the privileges granted to boys; the father’s place in the family, the universal predominance of males, and upbringing all confirm her idea of masculine superiority. Later, in the course of sexual relations, even the coital posture that places the woman underneath the man is an added humiliation. She reacts by a “masculine protest”; she either tries to masculinize herself or uses her feminine wiles to go into battle against man. Through motherhood she can find in her child the equivalent of the penis. But this supposes that she must first accept herself completely as woman, and thus accept her inferiority. She is far more deeply divided against herself than is man. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
937:Esa pareja equilibrada no es una utopía ; existen tales parejas, a veces incluso en el mismo marco del matrimonio pero con más frecuencia fuera de él; unos están unidos por un gran amor sexual, que los deja libres en cuanto a sus amistades y ocupaciones; otros se hallan unidos por una amistad que no entorpece su libertad sexual; más raramente, los hay que son a la vez amantes y amigos, pero sin buscar el uno en el otro la exclusiva razón de vivir. Multitud de matices son posibles en la relación entre un hombre y una mujer: la camaradería, el placer, la confianza, la ternura, la complicidad, el amor, pueden ser el uno para el otro la más fecunda fuente de alegría, de riqueza y de fuerza que pueda ofrecérsele a un ser humano. No son los individuos los responsables del fracaso del matrimonio: es —en contra de lo que pretenden Bonald, Comte, Tolstoi— la institución misma la que está originariamente pervertida. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
938:Meantime, other “feminist bibles”had appeared, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex being the best. Which brings me to something no one believes. When I wrote The Golden Notebook it never occurred to me I was writing “a feminist bible.”The sixties feminists were not the first in the arena. “The Woman Question”dated from the fifteenth century. In communist circles in the forties and fifties feminist issues were much discussed. But the second sentence of The Golden Notebook is: “‘The point is,’said Anna, ‘as far as I can see, everything is cracking up.’“This is what I thought The Golden Notebook was about, as its “structure”said. Everything was cracking up, and by now it is easily seen that we live in a fast-fragmenting culture. So I became “a feminist icon.”But what had I said in The Golden Notebook? That any kind of singlemindedness, narrowness, obsession, was bound to lead to mental disorder, if not madness. (This may be observed most easily in religion and politics.) ~ Doris Lessing, #NFDB
939:Non regnavo più sul mondo; le facciate delle case, gli sguardi indifferenti dei passanti mi esiliavano. Fu per questa ragione che il mio amore per la campagna prese dei colori mistici. Arrivata a Meyrignac, i muri crollavano, l'orizzonte si allontanava. Mi perdevo nell'infinito pur restando me stessa. Sentivo sulle palpebre il calore del sole che brilla per tutti, ma che lì, in quell'istante, non accarezzava che me. Il vento volteggiava intorno ai pioppi: veniva da altri posti, da dovunque, scuoteva lo spazio, e io turbinavo immobile fino ai confini della terra. Quando nel cielo si levava la luna, io comunicavo con le lontane città, con i deserti, i mari, i villaggi che in quel momento si bagnavano nella sua luce. Non ero più una coscienza vacante, uno sguardo astratto, ma l'odore ondoso dei campi di grano, l'odore intimo delle brughiere, il calore spesso del mezzogiorno, o il fremito dei crepuscoli: avevo peso, e tuttavia evaporavo nell'azzurro, non avevo più confini. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
940:A husband looks for himself in his wife, a lover in his mistress, in the guise of a stone statue; he seeks in her the myth of his virility, his sovereignty, his unmediated reality...But he himself is a slave to his double: what effort to build up an image in which he is always in danger! After all, it is founded on the capricious freedom of women: it must constantly be made favorable; man is consumed by the concern to appear male, important, superior; he playacts so that others will playact with him; he is also aggressive and nervous; he feels hostility for women because he is afraid of them, and he is afraid of them because he is afraid of the character with whom he is assimilated. What time and energy he wastes in getting rid of, idealizing, and transposing complexes, in speaking about women, seducing, and fearing them! He would be liberated with their liberation. But that is exactly what he fears. And he persists in the mystifications meant to maintain women in chains. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
941:I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one with any nourishment. At the most, if my books are still read, the reader will think: There wasn’t much she didn’t see! But that unique sum of things, the experience that I lived, with all its order and its randomness — the Opera of Peking, the arena of Huelva, the candomblé in Bahía, the dunes of El-Oued, Wabansia Avenue, the dawns in Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking to five hundred thousand Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert, Torcello, Rome, all the things I’ve talked about, others I have left unspoken — there is no place where it will all live again ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
942:No one would take me just as I was, no one loved me; I shall love myself enough, I thought, to make up for this abandonment by everyone. Formerly, I had been quite satisfied with myself, but I had taken very little trouble to increase my self-knowledge; from now on, I would stand outside myself, watch over and observe myself; in my diary I had long conversations with myself. I was entering a world whose newness stunned me. I learned to distinguish between distress and melancholy, lack of emotion and serenity; I learned to recognize the hesitations of the heart, and its ecstasies, the splendor of great renunciations, and the subterranean murmurings of hope. I entered into exalted trances, as on those evenings when I used to gaze upon the sky full of moving clouds behind the distant blue of the hills; I was both the landscape and its beholder: I existed only through myself, and for myself… My path was clearly marked: I had to perfect, enrich and express myself in a work of art that would help others to live. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
943:Así, la suerte de la mujer y la del socialismo están íntimamente ligadas, como se ve también
en la vasta obra consagrada por Bebel a la mujer. «La mujer y el proletario -dice- son
dos oprimidos.» Será el mismo desarrollo de la economía a partir de la revolución provocada
por el maquinismo el que libere a ambos. El problema de la mujer se reduce al de su
capacidad de trabajo. Poderosa en los tiempos en que las técnicas estaban adaptadas a sus
posibilidades, destronada cuando se mostró incapaz de explotarlas, la mujer encuentra de
nuevo en el mundo moderno su igualdad con el hombre. Son las resistencias del viejo
paternalismo capitalista las que impiden en la mayoría de los países que esa igualdad se
cumpla concretamente: se cumplirá el día en que esas resistencias sean destruidas. Ya se ha
cumplido en la URSS, afirma la propaganda soviética. Y cuando la sociedad socialista sea una
realidad en el mundo entero, ya no habrá hombres y mujeres, sino solamente trabajadores
iguales entre sí. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
944:If they want to flirt or initiate a friendship, they should carefully avoid giving the impression they are taking the initiative; men do not like tomboys, nor bluestockings, nor thinking women; too much audacity, culture, intelligence, or character frightens them.
In most novels, as George Eliot observes, it is the dumb, blond heroine who outshines the virile brunette; and in The Mill on the Floss, Maggie tries in vain to reverse the roles; in the end she dies and it is blond Lucy who marries Stephen. In The Last of the Mohicans, vapid Alice wins the hero’s heart and not valiant Cora; in Little Women kindly Jo is only a childhood friend for Laurie; he vows his love to curly-haired and insipid Amy.
To be feminine is to show oneself as weak, futile, passive, and docile. The girl is supposed not only to primp and dress herself up but also to repress her spontaneity and substitute for it the grace and charm she has been taught by her elder sisters. Any self-assertion will take away from her femininity and her seductiveness. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
945:Stamattina ho avuto un'illuminazione: è tutta colpa mia. Il mio errore pià grave è stato di non capire che il tempo passa.
Il tempo passava e io ero fissa nell'atteggiamento della sposa ideale di un marito ideale. Invece di rianimare la nostra vita sessuale m'incantavo nel ricordo delle nostre notti di una volta. Mi immaginavo di aver conservato il mio viso e il mio corpo di trent'anni invece di curare il mio fisico. Ho lasciato atrofizzare la mia intelligenza; non mi coltivavo più; mi dicevo: 'più tardi, quando le bambine mi avranno lasciata'.
Si, la giovane studentessa che Maurice sposò, che si appassionava agli avvenimenti, alle idee, ai libri, era ben diversa dalla donna di oggi, il cui universo è tutto in queste quattro mura. Ed è vero che avevo la tendenza a imprigionarvi Maurice. credevo che la sua famiglia dovesse bastargli, credevo di averlo tutto per me. In generale davo tutto per scontato, e questo deve averlo seccato, lui che cambia, che mette sempre in questione tutte le cose. La noia non perdona"
-Una donna spezzata- ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
946:In particular those who are condemned to stagnation are often pronounced happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being at rest. This notion we reject, for our perspective is that of existentialist ethics. Every subject plays his part as such specifically through exploits or projects that serve as a mode of transcendence; he achieves liberty only through a continual reaching out towards other liberties. There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence falls back into immanence, stagnation, there is a degradation of existence into the ‘en-sois’ – the brutish life of subjection to given conditions – and of liberty into constraint and contingence. This downfall represents a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it spells frustration and oppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil. Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
947:Men of today seem to feel more acutely than ever the paradox of their condition. They know themselves to be the supreme end to which all action should be subordinated, but the exigencies of action force them to treat one another as instruments or obstacles, as means. The more widespread their mastery of the world, the more they find themselves crushed by uncontrollable forces. Though they are masters of the atomic bomb, yet it is created only to destroy them. Each one has the incomparable taste in his mouth of his own life, and yet each feels himself more insignificant than an insect within the immense collectivity whose limits are one with the earth's. Perhaps in no other age have they manifested their grandeur more brilliantly, and in no other age has this grandeur been so horribly flouted. In spite of so many stubborn lies, at every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
948:The term ‘female’ is derogatory not because it emphasises woman’s animality, but because it imprisons her in her sex; and if this sex seems to man to be contemptible and inimical even in harmless dumb animals, it is evidently because of the uneasy hostility stirred up in him by woman. Nevertheless he wishes to find in biology a justification for this sentiment. The word female brings up in his mind a saraband of imagery – a vast, round ovum engulfs and castrates the agile spermatozoan; the monstrous and swollen termite queen rules over the enslaved males; the female praying mantis and the spider, satiated with love, crush and devour their partners; the bitch in heat runs through the alleys, trailing behind her a wake of depraved odours; the she-monkey presents posterior immodestly and then steals away with hypocritical coquetry; and the most superb wild beasts – the tigress, the lioness, the panther – bed down slavishly under the imperial embrace of the male. Females sluggish, eager, artful, stupid, callous, lustful, ferocious, abased – man projects them all at once upon woman. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
949:The continuous work of our life,” says Montaigne, “is to build death.” He quotes the Latin poets: Prima, quae vitam dedit, hora corpsit. And again: Nascentes morimur. Man knows and thinks this tragic ambivalence which the animal and the plant merely undergo. A new paradox is thereby introduced into his destiny. “Rational animal,” “thinking reed,” he escapes from his natural condition without, however, freeing himself from it. He is still a part of this world of which he is a consciousness. He asserts himself as a pure internality against which no external power can take hold, and he also experiences himself as a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things. At every moment he can grasp the non-temporal truth of his existence. But between the past which no longer is and the future which is not yet, this moment when he exists is nothing. This privilege, which he alone possesses, of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects, is what he shares with all his fellow-men. In turn an object for others, he is nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which he depends. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
950:What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? When I give a book, I always try to find something that I loved, and most important, speaks to the person’s dreams, yearnings, or challenges they are facing. For friends who have faced or are facing cancer, I often give them The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee, because this beautifully written book weaves together science and story so elegantly, and helped me understand cancer—the history, causes, and innovative treatment—when my son had cancer. For new cooks I give Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything because it delivers exactly what it promises! For New York City geeks—and I know a lot of them—I gave Nonstop Metropolis by Rebecca Solnit. For a great novel that I have read three times, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. For young women, I get The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, which I read when I was studying in Paris. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” And for those who struggle with productivity and taking control of their lives, The 4-Hour Workweek, of course! ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
951:When she does not find love, she may find poetry. Because she does not act, she observes, she feels, she records; a color, a smile awakens profound echoes within her; her destiny is outside her, scattered in cities already built, on the faces of men already marked by life, she makes contact, she relishes with passion and yet in a manner more detached, more free, than that of a young man. Being poorly integrated in the universe of humanity and hardly able to adapt herself therein, she, like the child, is able to see it objectively; instead of being interested solely in her grasp on things, she looks for their significance; she catches their special outlines, their unexpected metamorphoses. She rarely feels a bold creativeness, and usually she lacks the technique of self-expression; but in her conversation, her letters, her literary essays, her sketches, she manifests an original sensitivity. The young girl throws herself into things with ardor, because she is not yet deprived of her transcendence; and 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. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
952:So there are long conversations in cafés about Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus and Raymond Queneau, and all the boys that we were just beginning to get excited about in London when the first French literature filtered across after the Liberation. My God, Leo, there is some very interesting stuff being written in France at present on the philosophical and literary front. I begin to get some glimmering too about ‘existentialism’ the latest philosophy of France – Sartre, out of Husserl, Heidegger and Kierkegaard. Last week I had a very great experience. Jean-Paul Sartre came to Brussels to give a lecture on existentialism, and I met him after the lecture, and on the following day during an interminable café séance. He is small, squints appallingly, is very simple and charming in manner and extremely attractive. What versatility! Philosophy, novels, plays, cinema, journalism! No wonder the stuffy professional philosophers are suspicious. I don’t make much yet of his phenomenology, but his theories on morals, which derive from Kierkegaard, seem to me first rate and just what English philosophy needs to have injected into its veins, to expel the loathsome humours of Ross and Prichard. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
953:Bazıları, hiçleşme arzusunun insanı eziyetten hoşlanmaya (mazoşizme) götürdüğünü öne sürmüşlerdir. Ancak daha önce de söylediğim gibi, eziyetseverlik ancak "kendimi, başkasının gözündeki nesnelliğimle büyülemeye” çalıştığım zaman söz konusu olabilir, yani öznenin bilinci ben’e doğru dönüp onu aşağılanmış durumda yakalamaya çalıştığı zaman. Oysa, sevdalı kadın, kendi ben’i içinde yabancılaşmış, kendine hayran biri aracılığı ile kendi dar sınırlarını aşmak, sınırsız olmak için yanar tutuştur. Kendini kurtarmak için teslim olur aşk’a; ancak putlaştırıcı aşkın aykırılığı şuradadır ki, sevdalı kadın, kendisini kurtarmak isterken bir de bakarsınız ki kendi varlığını bütünüyle yadsımış. Duygusu sofuca(gizemci) bir boyut kazanır; tanrıdan artık kendisine hayran olmasını, kendisini onaylamasını beklemez; onun varlığında erimek, onun kollarında kendinden geçmek ister. “Bir aşk ermişi olmak isterdim, diyor Madam D’agoult. Böyle çileci coşkunluk ve çılgınlık anlarında, kendini dine adamış insanları kıskanıyorum.” Bu sözlerde ortaya çıkan şey, sevgiliyle seveni ayıran sınırların yıkılması, ben’in kökünden yok edilmesi arzusudur; bu bir eziyetseverlik değil, coşku içinde birleşme, bir olma düşüdür: “O çağda, gelip bu dünyadaki en büyük arzunuz nedir deseler, hiç çekinmeden: onun ruhunu besleyen kaynak, içini ısıtan alev olmak, derdim. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
954:Time for an exercise, which I shall call 'Say It Out Loud With Miranda'. Please take a moment to sit back, breathe and intone: 'I am taking myself seriously as a woman.' Note your response. If you're reading this on the bus, or surreptitiously in the cinema, or in any other public scenario, then please note other people's responses. (If you are male, and teenaged, and reading this in a room with other teenage boys, then for your own safety I advise you not to participate.)
The rest of you – what comes to mind when you say those words? Is it a fine lady scientist, a ballsy young anarchist with tights on her head or a feminist intellectual from the 1970s nose-down in Simone de Beauvoir? Or is it what I think my friend meant when she said 'woman' which is really 'aesthetic object'. Clothes-horse. Show pony. General beautiful piece of well-groomed stuff that's lovely to look at?
I reckon, to my great dismay, that she did indeed mean the latter. And in saying that I don't take myself seriously in this regard her assessment of me is absolutely bang-on. If taking oneself seriously as a woman means committing to a like of grooming, pumicing, pruning and polishing one's exterior for the benefit of onlookers, then I may as well heave my unwieldy rucksack to the top of a bleak Scottish hill and make my home there under a stone, where I'll fashion shoes out of mud and clothes out of leaves. ~ Miranda Hart,#NFDB
955:La gente no acepta que se le diga sus verdades. Quieren que se crea sus lindas palabras o por lo menos que uno haga como si. Yo soy lúcida soy franca arranco las caretas. La tipeja que susurra: '¿Así que quiere mucho a su hermanito?' y yo con mi vocecita serena 'Lo detesto'. He seguido siendo esa adolescente que dice lo que piensa no hace trampas. Se me partía el corazón escucharlo pontificar y todos esos infelices de rodillas delante de él. Yo aparecía con mis grandes zuecos sus palabras solemnes quedaban desinfladas: el progreso la prosperidad el porvenir del hombre la felicidad de la humanidad la ayuda a los países subdesarrollados la paz del mundo. No soy racista pero me importan un pito los árabes los judíos los negros exactamente como me importan un pito los chinos los rusos los yanquis los franchutes. Me importa un pito la humanidad qué es lo que ella ha hecho por mí me gustaría saberlo. Si son lo bastante estúpidos como para degollarse bombardearse tirarse napalm exterminarse no gastaré mis ojos llorando. Un millón de niños degollados ¿y qué? Los niños nunca son otra cosa que semilla de canallas y así se descongestiona un poco el planeta reconocen que está superpoblado ¿y entonces qué? Si yo fuera la tierra me daría asco toda esa gusanada en mi espalda me la sacudiría. Si todos revientan yo quiero reventar. Los niños no son nada para mí no voy a enternecer por ellos. Mi hija está muerta y me han robado a mi hijo. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
956:The fact is that the individual, though its genotypic sex is fixed at fertilisation, can be profoundly affected by the environment in which it develops. In the ants, bees, and termites the larval nutrition determines whether the genotypic female individual will become a fully developed female (‘queen’) or a sexually retarded worker. In these cases the whole organism is affected; but the gonads do not play a part in establishing the sexual differences of the body, or soma. In the vertebrates, however, the hormones secreted by the gonads are the essential regulators. Numerous experiments show that by varying the hormonal (endocrine) situation, sex can be profoundly affected. Grafting and castration experiments on adult animals and man have contributed to the modern theory of sexuality, according to which the soma is in a way identical in male and female vertebrates. It may be regarded as a kind of neutral element upon which the influence of the gonad imposes the sexual characteristics. Some of the hormones secreted by the gonad act as stimulators, others as inhibitors. Even the genital tract itself is somatic, and embryological investigations show that it develops in the male or female direction from an indifferent and in some respects hermaphroditic condition under the hormonal influence. Intersexuality may result when the hormones are abnormal and hence neither one of the two sexual potentialities is exclusively realised. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
957:Depuis la naissance de l'amour courtois, c'est un lieu commun que le mariage tue l'amour. Trop méprisée ou trop respectée, trop quotidienne, l'épouse n'est plus un objet érotique. Les rites du mariage sont primitivement destinés à défendre l'homme contre la femme ; elle devient sa propriété : mais tout ce que nous possédons en retour nous possède ; le mariage est pour l'homme aussi une servitude ; c'est alors qu'il est pris au piège tendu par la nature : pour avoir désiré une fraîche jeune fille, le mâle doit pendant toute sa vie nourrir une épaisse matrone, une vieillarde desséchée ; le délicat joyau destiné à embellir son existence devient un odieux fardeau : Xanthippe est un des types féminins dont les hommes ont toujours parlé avec le plus d'horreur. Mais lors même que la femme est jeune il y a dans le mariage une mystification puisque prétendant socialiser l'érotisme, il n'a réussi qu'à le tuer. C'est que l'érotisme implique une revendication de l'instant contre le temps, de l'individu contre la collectivité ; il affirme la séparation contre la communication ; il est rebelle à toute réglementation ; il contient un principe hostile à la société. Jamais les mœurs ne sont pliées à la rigueur des institutions et des lois : c'est contre elles que l'amour s'est de tout temps affirmé. Sous sa figure sensuelle, il s'adresse en Grèce et à Rome à des jeunes gens ou à des courtisanes ; charnel et platonique à la fois, l'amour courtois est toujours destiné à l'épouse d'un autre. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
958:A moment ago, when he entered this human aviary, the pictures, modestly enclosed in four wooden mouldings, remained flat and silent before him; in order to wrest their secret from them, he must believe in them. He wanted to believe in them. He stood in front of one of the canvases. Between the two walls, drenched in sunlight, a single hoop rolled towards that point where the parallels meet in infinity. Little by little, as he looked at it, the picture came alive. What it was saying he could not be translated into words; it was said in painting and no other language could have expressed its meaning; but it spoke. He advanced a few paces. Under his attentive gaze, all the pictures came alive; they awoke memories more ancient than the beginning of the world; they evoked the unpredictable face of the earth far beyond the revolutions to come; they exposed the secrets of a jagged coastline, of a dessert sprinkled with shells, as they remained solitary within themselves, protected from any conscience. Statues without faces, men turned to pillars of salt, landscapes scorched by the flames of death, oceans frozen into immobility of the absolute instant: these were the thousand shapes of absence. And while he looked at this universe devoid of onlookers, it seemed as if he were absent from himself, and that he remained, outside his own personal history, in an empty white eternity. And yet that dream of purity and absence only existed because I was there to lend it the strength of my life. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
959:Art, literature, and philosophy are attempts to found the world anew on a human freedom: that of the creator; to foster such an aim, one must first unequivocally posit oneself as a freedom. The restrictions that education and custom impose on a woman limit her grasp of the universe...Indeed, for one to become a creator, it is not enough to be cultivated, that is, to make going to shows and meeting people part of one's life; culture must be apprehended through the free movement of a transcendence; the spirit with all its riches must project itself in an empty sky that is its to fill; but if a thousand fine bonds tie it to the earth, its surge is broken. The girl today can certainly go out alone, stroll in the Tuileries; but I have already said how hostile the street is: eyes everywhere, hands waiting: if she wanders absentmindedly, her thoughts elsewhere, if she lights a cigarette in a cafe, if she goes to the cinema alone, an unpleasant incident can quickly occur; she must inspire respect by the way she dresses and behaves: this concern rivets her to the ground and self. "Her wings are clipped." At eighteen, T.E. Lawrence went on a grand tour through France by bicycle; a young girl would never be permitted to take on such an adventure...Yet such experiences have an inestimable impact: this is how an individual in the headiness of freedom and discovery learns to look at the entire world as his fief...[The girl] may feel alone within the world: she never stands up in front of it, unique and sovereign. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
960:The fact is that men encounter more complicity in their woman companions than the oppressor usually finds in the oppressed; and in bad faith they use it as a pretext to declare that woman wanted the destiny they imposed on her. We have seen that in reality her whole education conspires to bar her from paths of revolt and adventure; all of society - beginning with her respected parents - lies to her in extolling the high value of love, devotion, and the gift of self and in concealing the fact that neither lover, husband nor children will be disposed to bear the burdensome responsibility of it. She cheerfully accepts these lies because they invite her to take the easy slope: and that is the worst of the crimes committed against her; from her childhood and throughout her life, she is spoiled, she is corrupted by the fact that this resignation, tempting to any existent anxious about her freedom, is mean to be her vocation; if one encourages a child to be lazy by entertaining him all day, without giving him the occasion to study, without showing him its value, no one will say when he reaches the age of man that he chose to be incapable and ignorant; this is how the woman is raised, without ever being taught the necessity of assuming her own existence; she readily lets herself count on the protection, love, help and guidance of others; she lets herself be fascinated by the hope of being able to realise her being without doing anything. She is wrong to yield to this temptation; but the man is ill advised to reproach her for it since it is he himself who tempted her. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
961:...it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence. Thus, to say that action has to be lived in its truth, that is, in the consciousness of the antinomies which it involves, does not mean that one has to renounce it. In Plutarch Lied Pierrefeu rightly says that in war there is no victory which can not be regarded as unsuccessful, for the objective which one aims at is the total annihilation of the enemy and this result is never attained; yet there are wars which are won and wars which are lost. So is it with any activity; failure and success are two aspects of reality which at the start are not perceptible. That is what makes criticism so easy and art so difficult: the critic is always in a good position to show the limits that every artist gives himself in choosing himself; painting is not given completely either in Giotto or Titian or Cezanne; it is sought through the centuries and is never finished; a painting in which all pictorial problems are resolved is really inconceivable; painting itself is this movement toward its own reality; it is not the vain displacement of a millstone turning in the void; it concretizes itself on each canvas as an absolute existence. Art and science do not establish themselves despite failure but through it; which does not prevent there being truths and errors, masterpieces and lemons, depending upon whether the discovery or the painting has or has not known how to win the adherence of human consciousnesses; this amounts to saying that failure, always ineluctable, is in certain cases spared and in others not. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
962:In the face of an obstacle which it is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid. If I persist in beating my fist against a stone wall, my freedom exhausts itself in this useless gesture without succeeding in giving itself a content. It debases itself in a vain contingency. Yet, there is hardly a sadder virtue than resignation. It transforms into phantoms and contingent reveries projects which had at the beginning been set up as will and freedom. A young man has hoped for a happy or useful or glorious life. If the man he has become looks upon these miscarried attempts of his adolescence with disillusioned indifference, there they are, forever frozen in the dead past. When an effort fails, one declares bitterly that he has lost time and wasted his powers. The failure condemns that whole part of ourselves which we had engaged in the effort. It was to escape this dilemma that the Stoics preached indifference. We could indeed assert our freedom against all constraint if we agreed to renounce the particularity of our projects. If a door refuses to open, let us accept not opening it and there we are free. But by doing that, one manages only to save an abstract notion of freedom. It is emptied of all content and all truth. The power of man ceases to be limited because it is annulled. It is the particularity of the project which determines the limitation of the power, but it is also what gives the project its content and permits it to be set up. There are people who are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything. But no one would dream of considering this gloomy passivity as the triumph of freedom ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
963:Maybe I’m not cut out for monogamy,” G. had said to me early on. “Maybe I should just live in a room by myself and have girlfriends.” Another woman might have said, “Now, where did I put my coat?” Being a madly infatuated rationalist who had read her Simone de Beauvoir, I took a deep breath and carefully and calmly explained that of course he had to make up his own mind about how he wanted to live, and that I understood fidelity wasn’t for everyone, that some people could be perfectly happy without it, but I wanted to give my whole self in love and I couldn’t do that if I was being compared to other women on a daily basis (which I was) or if our relationship was only tentative and provisional (which it was). “Sweetie!” he said when I finished. “I love it that you can say how you feel without getting angry at me.” That other woman would have slammed the door behind her before he’d finished speaking. They say philanderers are attractive to women because of the thrill of the chase—you want to be the one to capture and tame that wild quarry. But what if a deeper truth is that women fall for such men because they want to be those men? Autonomous, in charge, making their own rules. Imagine that room G. spoke of, in which the women would come and go—is there not something attractive about it? Rain tapping softly on the tin ceiling, a desk, a lamp, a bed. A woman dashes up the narrow stairs, her raincoat flaring, her wet face lifted up like a flower. And then, the next day—maybe even the same day—different footsteps, another expectant face. I had to admit, it was an exciting scenario. You wouldn’t want to be one of the women trooping up and down the staircase, but you might want to be the man who lived in the room. ~ Katha Pollitt, #NFDB
964:Woman thus emerged as the inessential who never returned to the essential, as the absolute Other, without reciprocity. All the creation myths express this conviction that is precious to the male, for example, the Genesis legend, which, through Christianity, has spanned Western civilization. Eve was not formed at the same time as man; she was not made either from a different substance or from the same clay that Adam was modeled from: she was drawn from the first male’s flank. Even her birth was not autonomous; God did not spontaneously choose to create her for herself and to be directly worshiped in turn: he destined her for man; he gave her to Adam to save him from loneliness, her spouse is her origin and her finality; she is his complement in the inessential mode. Thus, she appears a privileged prey. She is nature raised to the transparency of consciousness; she is a naturally submissive consciousness. And therein lies the marvelous hope that man has often placed in woman: he hopes to accomplish himself as being through carnally possessing a being while making confirmed in his freedom by a docile freedom. No man would consent to being a woman, but all want there to be women. “Thank God for creating woman.” “Nature is good because it gave men woman.” In these and other similar phrases, man once more asserts arrogantly and naively that his presence in this world is an inevitable fact and a right, that of woman is a simple accident—but a fortunate one. Appearing as the Other, woman appears at the same time as a plenitude of being by opposition to the nothingness of existence that man experiences in itself; the Other, posited as object in the subject’s eyes, is posited as in-itself, thus as being. Woman embodies positively the lack the existent carries in his heart, and man hopes to realize himself by finding himself through her. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
965:A menudo me he interrogado sobre la razón y el sentido de mis rabietas. Creo que se explican en parte por una vitalidad fogosa y por un extremismo al cual nunca he renunciado del todo. Llevaba mis repugnancias hasta el vómito, mis deseos hasta la obsesión; un abismo separaba las cosas que me gustaban de las que no me gustaban. No podía aceptar con indiferencia la caída que me precipitaba de la plenitud al vacío, de la beatitud al horror; si la consideraba fatal, me resignaba; nunca me enojé contra un objeto. Pero me negaba a ceder a esa fuerza impalpable: las palabras; lo que me
sublevaba es que una frase lanzada al descuido: "Debes hacerlo... no debes hacerlo", arruinara en un instante mis empresas y mis alegrías. Lo
arbitrario de las órdenes y de las prohibiciones contra las que chocaba denunciaba su inconsistencia; ayer pelé un durazno: ¿por qué no esa ciruela?, ¿por qué dejar mis juegos justo en este minuto? En todas partes encontraba obligaciones, en ninguna parte su necesidad. En el corazón de la ley que me abrumaba con el implacable rigor de las piedras, yo entreveía
una ausencia vertiginosa: me sumergía en ese abismo, la boca desgarrada por gritos. Aferrándome al suelo, pataleando, oponía mi peso de carne al aéreo poder que me tiranizaba; lo obligaba a materializarse; me encerraban en un cuarto oscuro entre escobas y plumeros; entonces podía golpear con los pies y las manos en muros verdaderos, en vez de debatirme contra inasibles voluntades. Yo sabía que esa lucha era vana; desde el momento en que mamá me había sacado de las manos la ciruela sangrienta, en que Louise había guardado en su bolsa mi pala y mis moldes, yo estaba vencida; pero no me rendía. Cumplía el trabajo de la derrota. Mis sobresaltos, las lágrimas que me cegaban, quebraban el tiempo, borraban el espacio, abolían a la vez el objeto de mi deseo y los obstáculos que me separaban de él. Me hundía en la noche de la impotencia; ya nada quedaba salvo mi presencia desnuda y ella
explotaba en largos aullidos. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
966:A menudo me he interrogado sobre la razón y el sentido de mis rabietas.
Creo que se explican en parte por una vitalidad fogosa y por un extremismo
al cual nunca he renunciado del todo. Llevaba mis repugnancias hasta el
vómito, mis deseos hasta la obsesión; un abismo separaba las cosas que me
gustaban de las que no me gustaban. No podía aceptar con indiferencia la
caída que me precipitaba de la plenitud al vacío, de la beatitud al horror;
si la consideraba fatal, me resignaba; nunca me enojé contra un objeto.
Pero me negaba a ceder a esa fuerza impalpable: las palabras; lo que me
sublevaba es que una frase lanzada al descuido: "Debes hacerlo... no debes
hacerlo", arruinara en un instante mis empresas y mis alegrías. Lo
arbitrario de las órdenes y de las prohibiciones contra las que chocaba
denunciaba su inconsistencia; ayer pelé un durazno: ¿por qué no esa
ciruela?, ¿por qué dejar mis juegos justo en este minuto? En todas partes
encontraba obligaciones, en ninguna parte su necesidad. En el corazón de la
ley que me abrumaba con el implacable rigor de las piedras, yo entreveía
una ausencia vertiginosa: me sumergía en ese abismo, la boca desgarrada por
gritos. Aferrándome al suelo, pataleando, oponía mi peso de carne al aéreo
poder que me tiranizaba; lo obligaba a materializarse; me encerraban en un
cuarto oscuro entre escobas y plumeros; entonces podía golpear con los pies
y las manos en muros verdaderos, en vez de debatirme contra inasibles
voluntades. Yo sabía que esa lucha era vana; desde el momento en que mamá
me había sacado de las manos la ciruela sangrienta, en que Louise había
guardado en su bolsa mi pala y mis moldes, yo estaba vencida; pero no me
rendía. Cumplía el trabajo de la derrota. Mis sobresaltos, las lágrimas que
me cegaban, quebraban el tiempo, borraban el espacio, abolían a la vez el
objeto de mi deseo y los obstáculos que me separaban de él. Me hundía en la
noche de la impotencia; ya nada quedaba salvo mi presencia desnuda y ella
explotaba en largos aullidos. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
967:As soon as one considers a system abstractly and theoretically, one puts himself, in effect, on the plane of the universal, thus, of the infinite. That is why reading the Hegelian system is so comforting. I remember having experienced a great feeling of calm on reading Hegel in the impersonal framework of the Bibliotheque Nationale in August 1940. But once I got into the street again, into my life, out of the system, beneath a real sky, the system was no longer of any use to me: what it had offered me, under a show of the infinite, was the consolations of death; and I again wanted to live in the midst of living men. I think that, inversely, existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men. Taking on its own account Descartes' revolt against the evil genius, the pride of the thinking reed in the face of the universe which crushes him, it asserts that, despite his limits, through them, it is up to each one to fulfill his existence as an absolute. Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive. There is a very old saying which goes: "Do what you must, come what may." That amounts to saying in a different way that the result is not external to the good will which fulfills itself in aiming at it. If it came to be that each man did what he must, existence would be saved in each one without there being any need of dreaming of a paradise where all would be reconciled in death. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
968:INTRODUCTION TO GENDER AND SOCIETY The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir A classic analysis of the Western conception of the woman. Feminism Is for Everybody by bell hooks A primer about the power and potential of feminist action. We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Feminism redefined for the twenty-first century. QUEER THEORY AND INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISM Gender Trouble by Judith Butler A classic, and groundbreaking, text about gender and the boundaries of identity. Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein A 1990s-era memoir of transition and nonbinary identity. This Bridge Called My Back ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa A collection of essays about the intersections between gender, class, sexuality, and race. Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde A landmark collection of essays and speeches by a lauded black lesbian feminist. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston A memoir of growing up as a Chinese American woman. MODERN HISTORY How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor A history of the Combahee River Collective, a group of radical black feminists operating in the 1960s and 1970s. And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts Investigative reportage about the beginning of the AIDS crisis. A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski An LGBT history of the United States, from 1492 to the present. CONTEMPORARY QUESTIONS Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus by Vanessa Grigoriadis An exploration of the effects of the sexual revolution in American colleges. The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin A book about the shifting power dynamics between men and women. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay Essays about the author’s experiences as a woman and our cultural understanding of womanhood. All the Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister An investigation into the lives of twenty-first-century unmarried women. GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN FICTION Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown A groundbreaking lesbian coming-of-age novel, originally published in 1973. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin A classic of morality and desire, set in 1950s Paris, about an American man and his relationship with an Italian bartender. Angels in America by Tony Kushner A Pulitzer Prize–winning play about the Reagan-era AIDS epidemic. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson A coming-of-age and coming-out novel about a woman growing up in an evangelical household. ~ Tom Perrotta, #NFDB
969:Simone de Beauvoir che scrive la leggenda di Sartre, scolpendo la statua del grand'uomo, sacrificando tutta la verità alla mitologia, fornisce la versione parigina e quindi francese, e quindi europea, e quindi mondiale, della vicenda. Ne “La forza delle cose, scrive: “Di fronte a un vasto pubblico egli (Camus) dichiarò: “amo la Giustizia, ma prima di essa difenderò mia madre” il che significava mettersi dalla parte dei pieds-noirs. Il peggio era che al tempo stesso dava a intendere che si manteneva al di sopra della mischia, avvallando così quanti desideravano ocncilaire questa guerra e i suoi metodi con l'umanesimo borghese.”
È lo stesso libro in cui la liberazione di Sartre dallo stalag nell'aprile del 1941, dovuta probabilmente a un intervento del filo nazista Drieu la Rochelle, si trasforma in un'evasione; in cui la partecipazione di Sartre alla rivista collaborazionista Comoedia durante la guerra viene presentata come un errore commesso una sola volta nel 1941, (mentre sappiamo che in realtà ancora nel settembre del 1943 il filosofo entra a far parte di una giunta organizzata dal giornale e il 5 febbraio del 1944 scrive l'elogio funebre di quel Giradoux che aveva celebrato le virtù del Reich nazista), e varie altre verità sulla Resistenza della famosa coppia.
Camus paga per la rettitudine, per l'integrità, per la correttezza delle proprie battaglie, paga per l'onestà, per la passione nei confronti della verità, paga per aver partecipato alla Resistenza quando molti avevano resistito così poco, paga per i propri successi, per le vendite formidabili dei propri libri, paga per il talento e paga, ovviamente, per il Nobel, paga per il fatto di non essere corruttibile, di non aver bisogno di mentire quando si è trattato di tracciare la retta via, paga per la giovinezza, la bellezza, il successo con le donne, paga per la vita filosofica che suona come un rimprovero di fronte all'esistenza di tanti falsari, paga per la fedeltà all'infanzia passata in mezzo alla gente umile, paga per non aver tradito e venduto niente, paga per essere entrato con effrazione, lui figlio di povera gente, nel mono bene di Saint-Germain-des-Prés, paga per aver scelto la Giustizia, la libertà e il popolo in un universo di intellettuali affascinati dalla violenza, dalla ferocia e dalle idee, paga per essere un autodidatta riuscito, paga per aver scritto lui, figlio di un'analfabeta, libri che non avrebbe mai dovuto scrivere perché riservati all' élite, paga perché a fare da legge, sono il risentimento, l'invidia, l'astio e la gelosia. ~ Michel Onfray,#NFDB
970:reading :::
50 Philosophy Classics: List of Books Covered:
1. Hannah Arendt - The Human Condition (1958)
2. Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics (4th century BC)
3. AJ Ayer - Language, Truth and Logic (1936)
4. Julian Baggini - The Ego Trick (2011)
5. Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
6. Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex (1952)
7. Jeremy Bentham - Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)
8. Henri Bergson - Creative Evolution (1911)
9. David Bohm - Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980)
10. Noam Chomsky - Understanding Power (2002)
11. Cicero - On Duties (44 BC)
12. Confucius - Analects (5th century BC)
13. Rene Descartes - Meditations (1641)
14. Ralph Waldo Emerson - Fate (1860)
15. Epicurus - Letters (3rd century BC)
16. Michel Foucault - The Order of Things (1966)
17. Harry Frankfurt - On Bullshit (2005)
18. Sam Harris - Free Will (2012)
19. GWF Hegel - Phenomenology of Spirit (1803)
20. Martin Heidegger - Being and Time (1927)
21. Heraclitus - Fragments (6th century)
22. David Hume - An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
23. William James - Pragmatism (1904)
24. Daniel Kahneman - Thinking: Fast and Slow (2011)
25. Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason (1781)
26. Soren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling (1843)
27. Saul Kripke - Naming and Necessity (1972)
28. Thomas Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
29. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - Theodicy (1710)
30. John Locke - An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
31. Marshall McLuhan - The Medium is the Massage (1967)
32. Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince (1532)
33. John Stuart Mill - On Liberty (1859)
34. Michel de Montaigne - Essays (1580)
35. Iris Murdoch - The Sovereignty of Good (1970)
36. Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
37. Blaise Pascal - Pensees (1670)
38. Plato - The Republic (4th century BC)
39. Karl Popper - The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934)
40. John Rawls - A Theory of Justice (1971)
41. Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract (1762)
42. Bertrand Russell - The Conquest of Happiness (1920)
43. Michael Sandel - Justice (2009)
44. Jean Paul Sartre - Being and Nothingness (1943)
45. Arthur Schopenhauer - The World as Will and Representation (1818)
46. Peter Singer - The Life You Can Save (2009)
47. Baruch Spinoza - Ethics (1677)
48. Nassim Nicholas - Taleb The Black Swan (2007)
49. Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations (1953)
50. Slavoj Zizek - Living In The End Times (2010)
~ Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Philosophy Classics,#NFDB
971:Sahici aşk, iki ayrı özgürlüğün karşılıklı tanınması temeline oturmak zorundadır; seven kadın da, erkek de, o zaman, hem kendi varlığını, hem de karşısındakinin varlığını duyacaktır: hiçbiri aşkınlığından vazgeçmeyecek, kendi varlığını sakatlamayacaktır; ikisi de, üzerinde yaşadıkları dünyada, birtakım değerler ve erekler bulup ortaya çıkaracaklardır. Her ikisi için de aşk, kendini verişte benliğini tanımak, evreni zenginleştirmek biçimine girecektir. Gerorge Gusdorf, la Connaissance de Soi ( İnsanın kendini tanıması) adlı yapıtında, erkeklerin aşktan, sevgiden beklediğini pek güzel özetlemektedir.
Aşk, bizi bizden, dar kalıbımızdan kurtararak kendi benliğimizi gösterir bize. Bize yabancı olan ve bizi tamamlayan varlıkla ilinti kurduğumuz an kendimizi olumlarız. Bir bilgi türü olan sevgi, nicedir içinde yaşadığımız görünüme bile yeni nitelikler kazandırır, önümüzde yeni gökler, yeni topraklar açılır. İşin en büyük sırrı da buradadır zaten: dünya bir başka varlıktır, ben de bir başka varlık’ım. Ve sevdiğim an, bunu bilen tek kişi olmaktan çıkarım. Daha da ileri giderek, bunu bana öğretenin işte bu ikinci kişi, (sevdiğim yabancı varlık) olduğunu söyleyebiliriz. Öyleyse, kadın erkeğin kendi varlığının bilincine varmasında en önemli rolü oynamaktadır.
Bir delikanlı için aşk konusunda çıraklık etmenin önemi de işte buradan gelmektedir: Stendhal’ın, Malraux’un “ben de bir başka varlık’ım” dedikleri anda duydukları engin zevki hepimiz biliyoruz. Ancak, Gusdorf, şu satırları yazarken haksızdır: “aynı şekilde, erkek de, kadın için, kendi varlığını tanımada kullanacağı vazgeçilmez bir aracıdır”, çünkü, bugün erkeğin durumu kadınınkinin aynı değildir; sevgi ilişkisinde erkek başka bir görünüşte ortaya çıkmakta, bu yeni görünüş de kişiliğine katılmakta, ama temek bir varlığı aynı kalmaktadır. Kadın da onun gibi kendisi için var olan bir varlık olabilseydi, sevgiden aynı yararı sağlayabilecekti; bu ise, onun iktisadi açıdan bağımsız olmasını, kendine özgü birtakım erekleri bulunmasını ve kimsenin aracılığı olmadan, kendisi, topluluk yönünde aşabilmesini gerektirir.
……
Erkekler, istek üzerine, sevginin, kasın için en yüce bütünleniş olduğunu ileri sürmüşlerdir. Nietzsche: “Kadın olarak seven bir kadın, bu sevginin yardımıyla, çok daha derinlemesine kadınlaşır” demiş.
…..
Kadın, güçsüzlüğü değil, güçlülüğü içinde; kendinden kaçmak değil, kendini bulabilmek; var olmaktan istifa etmek değil, varlığını olumlamak üzere sevebildiği gün, aşk, hem onun hem de erkek için korkunç bir tehlike olmaktan çıkıp bir yaşam kaynağı haline gelecektir.
…..
Erkek titiz bir iyi niyete sahipse, evli ya da sevdalı çiftlerde, karşılıklı bir cömertlik içinde, tam bir eşitliğe kavuşmak mümkün olmaktadır.
….. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
972:Una recente statistica diceva che le donne forniscono 45 miliardi di ore di lavoro domestico contro i 43 miliardi di ore di lavoro salariato.
Il volume del lavoro domestico supera dunque di gran lunga il lavoro salariato. Se la società dovesse pagare quel lavoro è evidente che ciò aumenterebbe enormemente tutte le sue spese. È un grandissimo vantaggio per la società avere donne che fanno questo enorme lavoro per niente.
Come ottenere allora che la donna faccia questo lavoro? Bisogna condizionarla. Dato che è difficile convincerla che essa ha la vocazione di lavare i patti, si è trovato qualcosa di meglio.
Si esalta la maternità, perché la maternità offre il modo di tenere la donna in casa e di farle fare le faccende domestiche. Invece di dire alla bambina di due, tre o quattro anni: «Sei destinata a lavare i piatti» le si dice «Sei destinata ad essere madre»; le regalano bambole, si esalta la maternità, in modo che quando diventa una ragazza non pensa ad altro, pensa soltanto a sposarsi e ad avere bambini. La si è convinta che non sarà una donna completa se non avrà bambini. Quando una donna non ha figli, si dice: «Non è una vera donna», ma quando un uomo non ha figli non si dice: «Non è un vero uomo».
Bisogna dunque che la donna sia asservita alla maternità. Se almeno avesse la libertà di essere madre quando vuole, nella misura in cui lo vuole, pianificando le nascite dei figli, avrebbe molta piú libertà in tutti i campi. Potrebbe rivaleggiare con l’uomo sul piano professionale, non sarebbe per tutta la vita inchiodata in casa; e cosí si porrebbe il problema di perché non debba essere l’uomo a lavare i piatti.
Per evitare che ciò avvenga, bisogna dunque imporre la maternità alla donna e imporgliela suo malgrado. Per questa ragione da quando esiste la possibilità di controllare le nascite, non si è mai cercato di facilitarne la messa in pratica, al punto che in Francia attualmente c’è solo il 7 per cento di donne che si servono di metodi anticoncezionali. È anche per questo che il governo, in questo momento, sta ritirando tutte le sovvenzioni alla Pianificazione familiare, la sola organizzazione che si è occupata di informare le donne. Il governo, tuttavia, riconosce di non avere alcuna soluzione di ricambio; ed è una cosa molto grave. Non solo si sopprime la Pianificazione familiare e le si tolgono le possibilità di agire, ma non si prevede niente al suo posto. Si impedisce dunque alle donne di difendersi dal concepimento quando non lo desiderano. E cosí rimangono incinte loro malgrado.
Non resta allora altro che procurarsi l’aborto, e cosí fanno un milione di donne francesi ogni anno, malgrado questa legge che di fatto non impedisce niente e che quindi non ha alcun senso. Ogni tanto si dà ad essa un’apparenza di esistenza, accusando qualche donna, sempre scelta tra le piú diseredate, perché non si è mai vista la moglie di un magistrato, di un ministro o di un grande industriale seduta al posto in cui stanno le accusate di oggi.
Eppure si può essere sicuri che ci sono altrettanti aborti in quegli ambienti come negli altri. La legge opprime tutte le donne, anche quelle che sono privilegiate.
Nella mia vita ho visto arrivare a casa mia in lacrime non solo operaie o impiegate, ma donne borghesi che avevano denaro; una volta ho perfino aiutato la moglie di un grande direttore di banca. Nonostante tutto, le donne sono isolate; anche col denaro, non si hanno sempre gli indirizzi che occorrono e non si sa a chi rivolgersi.
Come dicevo in principio, si è inculcato nell’animo delle donne un tale senso di colpa, che l’aborto diviene per loro qualcosa di traumatizzante, mentre non lo sarebbe affatto se avvenisse in condizioni legali. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
973:Una recente statistica diceva che le donne forniscono 45 miliardi di ore di lavoro domestico contro i 43 miliardi di ore di lavoro salariato.
Il volume del lavoro domestico supera dunque di gran lunga il lavoro salariato. Se la società dovesse pagare quel lavoro è evidente che ciò aumenterebbe enormemente tutte le sue spese. È un grandissimo vantaggio per la società avere donne che fanno questo enorme lavoro per niente.
Come ottenere allora che la donna faccia questo lavoro? Bisogna condizionarla. Dato che è difficile convincerla che essa ha la vocazione di lavare i patti, si è trovato qualcosa di meglio.
Si esalta la maternità, perché la maternità offre il modo di tenere la donna in casa e di farle fare le faccende domestiche. Invece di dire alla bambina di due, tre o quattro anni: «Sei destinata a lavare i piatti» le si dice «Sei destinata ad essere madre»; le regalano bambole, si esalta la maternità, in modo che quando diventa una ragazza non pensa ad altro, pensa soltanto a sposarsi e ad avere bambini. La si è convinta che non sarà una donna completa se non avrà bambini. Quando una donna non ha figli, si dice: «Non è una vera donna», ma quando un uomo non ha figli non si dice: «Non è un vero uomo».
Bisogna dunque che la donna sia asservita alla maternità. Se almeno avesse la libertà di essere madre quando vuole, nella misura in cui lo vuole, pianificando le nascite dei figli, avrebbe molta piú libertà in tutti i campi. Potrebbe rivaleggiare con l’uomo sul piano professionale, non sarebbe per tutta la vita inchiodata in casa; e cosí si porrebbe il problema di perché non debba essere l’uomo a lavare i piatti.
Per evitare che ciò avvenga, bisogna dunque imporre la maternità alla donna e imporgliela suo malgrado. Per questa ragione da quando esiste la possibilità di controllare le nascite, non si è mai cercato di facilitarne la messa in pratica, al punto che in Francia attualmente c’è solo il 7 per cento di donne che si servono di metodi anticoncezionali. È anche per questo che il governo, in questo momento, sta ritirando tutte le sovvenzioni alla Pianificazione familiare, la sola organizzazione che si è occupata di informare le donne. Il governo, tuttavia, riconosce di non avere alcuna soluzione di ricambio; ed è una cosa molto grave. Non solo si sopprime la Pianificazione familiare e le si tolgono le possibilità di agire, ma non si prevede niente al suo posto. Si impedisce dunque alle donne di difendersi dal concepimento quando non lo desiderano. E cosí rimangono incinte loro malgrado.
Non resta allora altro che procurarsi l’aborto, e cosí fanno un milione di donne francesi ogni anno, malgrado questa legge che di fatto non impedisce niente e che quindi non ha alcun senso. Ogni tanto si dà ad essa un’apparenza di esistenza, accusando qualche donna, sempre scelta tra le piú diseredate, perché non si è mai vista la moglie di un magistrato, di un ministro o di un grande industriale seduta al posto in cui stanno le accusate di oggi.
Eppure si pu�� essere sicuri che ci sono altrettanti aborti in quegli ambienti come negli altri. La legge opprime tutte le donne, anche quelle che sono privilegiate.
Nella mia vita ho visto arrivare a casa mia in lacrime non solo operaie o impiegate, ma donne borghesi che avevano denaro; una volta ho perfino aiutato la moglie di un grande direttore di banca. Nonostante tutto, le donne sono isolate; anche col denaro, non si hanno sempre gli indirizzi che occorrono e non si sa a chi rivolgersi.
Come dicevo in principio, si è inculcato nell’animo delle donne un tale senso di colpa, che l’aborto diviene per loro qualcosa di traumatizzante, mentre non lo sarebbe affatto se avvenisse in condizioni legali. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
974:Stendhal, desde infância, amou as mulheres sensualmente; projetou nelas as aspirações de sua adolescência; imaginava-se de bom grado salvando de algum perigo uma bela desconhecida e conquistando-lhe o amor. Chegando a Paris, o que desejava mais ardentemente era "uma mulher encantadora; nós nos adoraremos, ela conhecerá minha alma"... Velho, escreve na poeira as iniciais das mulheres que mais amou. "Creio que foi o devaneio que preferi a tudo", confia-nos ele. E são imagens de
mulheres que lhe alimentaram os sonhos; a lembrança delas anima as paisagens. "A linha de rochedos aproximando-se de Arbois, creio, e vindo de Dôle pela estrada principal, foi para mim uma imagem sensível e evidente da alma de Métilde." A música, a pintura, a arquitetura, tudo o que amou, amou-o com uma alma de amante infeliz; quando passeia em Roma, a cada página, uma mulher aparece; nas saudades, nos desejos, nas tristezas, nas alegrias
que elas suscitaram-lhe, conheceu o gosto do próprio coração; a elas é que deseja como juizes. Freqüenta-lhes os salões, procura mostrar-se brilhante aos seus olhos, deveu-lhes suas maiores felicidades, suas penas; foram sua principal ocupação. Prefere seu amor a toda amizade e sua amizade à dos homens; mulheres inspiram seus livros, figuras de mulheres os povoam; é em grande parte para elas que escreve. "Corro o risco de ser lido em 1900 pelas almas que amo, as Mme Roland, as Mélanie Guibert..." As mulheres foram a própria subsistência de sua vida. De onde lhe veio esse privilégio? Esse terno amigo das mulheres, e precisamente porque as ama em sua verdade, não crê no mistério feminino; nenhuma essência define de uma vez por todas a mulher; a idéia de um "eterno feminino" parece-lhe pedante e ridículo. "Pedantes repetem há dois mil anos que as mulheres têm o espírito mais vivo e os homens, mais solidez; que as mulheres têm mais delicadeza nas idéias e os homens, maior capacidade de atenção. Um basbaque de Paris que passeava outrora pelos jardins de Versalhes concluía, do que via, que as árvores nascem podadas." As diferenças que se observam entre os homens e as mulheres refletem as de sua situação. Por exemplo, por que não seriam as mulheres mais romanescas do que seus amantes? "Uma mulher com seu bastidor de bordar, trabalho insípido que só ocupa as mãos, pensa no amante, enquanto este galopando no campo com seu esquadrão é preso se faz um movimento em falso." Acusam igualmente as mulheres de carecerem de bom senso. "As mulheres preferem as emoções à razão; é muito simples: como em virtude de nossos costumes vulgares elas não são encarregadas de nenhum negócio na família, a razão nunca lhes ê útil.. . Encarregai vossa mulher de tratar de vossos interesses com os arrendatários de duas de vossas propriedades; aposto que as contas serão mais bem feitas do que por vós." Se a História revela-nos tão pequeno número de gênios femininos é porque a sociedade as priva de quaisquer meios de expressão: "Todos os gênios que nascem mulheres estão perdidos para a felicidade do público; desde que o acaso lhes dê os meios de se revelarem, vós as vereís desenvolver os mais difíceis talentos." O pior handicap que devem suportar é a educação com que as embrutecem; o opressor esforça-se sempre por diminuir os que oprime; é propositadamente que o homem recusa às mulheres quaisquer possibilidades. "Deixemos ociosas nelas as qualidades mais brilhantes e mais ricas de felicidade para elas mesmas e para nós." Aos dez anos, a menina é mais fina e viva do que seu irmão; com vinte, o moleque é homem de espírito e a moça "uma grande idiota desajeitada, tímida e com medo de urna aranha"; o erro está na formação que teve. Fora necessário dar à mulher exatamente a mesma instrução que se dá aos rapazes. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,#NFDB
The Act of Creation text, #The Act of Creation, #Arthur Koestler, #Psychology
Lysistrata to Ann Veronica and Simone de Beauvoir; next, love
triumphant, or defeated the Song of Songs alternating with Isolde's
--- Overview of noun simone_de_beauvoir
The noun simone de beauvoir has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts)
1. Beauvoir, Simone de Beauvoir ::: (French feminist and existentialist and novelist (1908-1986))
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun simone_de_beauvoir
1 sense of simone de beauvoir
Sense 1
Beauvoir, Simone de Beauvoir
INSTANCE OF=> feminist, women's rightist, women's liberationist, libber
=> reformer, reformist, crusader, social reformer, meliorist
=> disputant, controversialist, eristic
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
INSTANCE OF=> existentialist, existentialist philosopher, existential philosopher
=> philosopher
=> scholar, scholarly person, bookman, student
=> intellectual, intellect
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
INSTANCE OF=> writer, author
=> communicator
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun simone_de_beauvoir
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun simone_de_beauvoir
1 sense of simone de beauvoir
Sense 1
Beauvoir, Simone de Beauvoir
INSTANCE OF=> feminist, women's rightist, women's liberationist, libber
INSTANCE OF=> existentialist, existentialist philosopher, existential philosopher
INSTANCE OF=> writer, author
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun simone_de_beauvoir
1 sense of simone de beauvoir
Sense 1
Beauvoir, Simone de Beauvoir
-> feminist, women's rightist, women's liberationist, libber
=> suffragette
HAS INSTANCE=> Beauvoir, Simone de Beauvoir
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-> existentialist, existentialist philosopher, existential philosopher
HAS INSTANCE=> Beauvoir, Simone de Beauvoir
HAS INSTANCE=> Camus, Albert Camus
HAS INSTANCE=> Heidegger, Martin Heidegger
HAS INSTANCE=> Sartre, Jean-Paul Sartre
-> writer, author
=> abstractor, abstracter
=> alliterator
=> authoress
=> biographer
=> coauthor, joint author
=> commentator, reviewer
=> compiler
=> contributor
=> cyberpunk
=> drafter
=> dramatist, playwright
=> essayist, litterateur
=> folk writer
=> framer
=> gagman, gagster, gagwriter
=> ghostwriter, ghost
=> Gothic romancer
=> hack, hack writer, literary hack
=> journalist
=> librettist
=> lyricist, lyrist
=> novelist
=> pamphleteer
=> paragrapher
=> poet
=> polemicist, polemist, polemic
=> rhymer, rhymester, versifier, poetizer, poetiser
=> scenarist
=> scriptwriter
=> space writer
=> speechwriter
=> tragedian
=> wordmonger
=> word-painter
=> wordsmith
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--- Grep of noun simone_de_beauvoir
simone de beauvoir
Wikipedia - Ariadne (Giorgio de Chirico) -- 20th century painting by Giorgio de Chirico
Wikipedia - Giorgio de Chirico
Wikipedia - Hebdomeros -- Book by Giorgio De Chirico
Wikipedia - The Child's Brain -- Painting by Giorgio de Chirico
Wikipedia - The Enigma of the Hour -- Painting by Giorgio de Chirico
Wikipedia - The Great Tower -- 1921 painting by Giorgio de Chirico
Wikipedia - The Nostalgia of the Infinite -- Painting by Giorgio de Chirico
Wikipedia - The Song of Love -- Painting by the Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico
Wikipedia - The Soothsayer's Recompense -- Painting by Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico ::: Born: July 10, 1888; Died: November 20, 1978; Occupation: Artist;
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/260548.Giorgio_de_Chirico
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Giorgio_de_Chirico
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Le_Retour_d'Ulysse,_Giorgio_De_Chirico,_1973.jpg
Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico: Argonaut of the Soul
Giorgio de Chirico Art Centre
Giorgio de Chirico House Museum
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