Simone de Beauvoir Quotations | Page 2

Cooking is revolution and creation ...

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's only arrogance if you're wrong.

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 ...

The Communists , following Hegel , speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.

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.

When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.