Love By Simone De Beauvoir Quotes & Sayings

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

It is so tiring to hate someone you love. — Simone De Beauvoir

She is the woman that contradicts Simone de Beauvoir's saying "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." She is the woman that makes your tooth pain seem like a trivial matter in comparison to the heartaches she causes as she deliberately passes by your side. She is the woman that makes your throat feel swollen and your tie to suddenly seem too tight. She is the woman that is able to take you to the seven heavens with a whisper; straight to cloud number nine.. She is the woman that erases all other women unintentionally and becomes without demanding the despot of your heart. She is the woman that sends you back and forth to purgatory and resurrects you with each unintended touch. She is the woman that will ask of you to burn Rome just to collect for her a handful of dust. — Malak El Halabi

Jealousy is not contemptible, real love has a beak and claws. — Simone De Beauvoir

I love you, with a touch of tragedy and quite madly. — Simone De Beauvoir

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

I tried to love you less.I couldn't. — Simone De Beauvoir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would have to have a bit of heroism and get out of myself. But I love myself so much! — Simone De Beauvoir

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

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

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

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

She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal. — Simone De Beauvoir

Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consultation for death. — Simone De Beauvoir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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