Quotes from Simone de Beauvoir

Girls are weighed down by restrictions, boys with demands - two equally harmful disciplines.

Choice springs from the totality of the person. Thus, to study, to analyze what a person is, does not eliminate the idea of freedom.

That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.

You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde.

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.

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.

No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.

The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.

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