Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir; 9 January 1908 – 14 April 1986) was a French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist and social theorist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth9 January 1908
CountryFrance
book writing men
A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.
book past doubt
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.
book honest confession
Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess.
children book despair
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[...].
One is not born a woman, but becomes one.
kind habit
Habit has a kind of poetry.
men white-hair two
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."
men thinking one-day
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.
running writing sleep
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.
sugar duration jars
there is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.
revenge reality literature
Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction ...
luck would-be world
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.
nature men united-states
Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.
fate names humanity
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.