Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

Quotes by and about Simone de Beauvoir

(Continued from her main entry on the site.)

Beauvoir: "I don't know why, but organic phenomena very soon ceased to interest me. When we were in the country, I helped Madeleine to feed her rabbits and her hens, but these tasks soon bored me and I cared very little for the softness of fur and feather."

Beauvoir: "In reality I was more inquisitive than methodical, more impulsive than finicky; but I revelled in schizophrenic daydreams of strictness and economy."

Beauvoir: "[A housewife] is overburdened with a thousand tiresome tasks. Whenever I thought of my own future, this servitude seemed to me so burdensome that I decided I wouldn't have any children; the important thing for me was to be able to form minds and mould characters."

Beauvoir: "[When I met Sartre] it was the first time in my life that I had felt intellectually inferior to anyone else."

Beauvoir: "It is the fate of women always to be secondary. To be the second sex."

John Marmysz: "[To Beauvoir] the nihilist is essentially a frustrated idealist precisely because the nihilist has come to the realization that abstract perfection of any kind is an impossible goal."