Simone de Beauvoir nejznámější citáty
Simone de Beauvoir: Citáty o ženách
Simone de Beauvoir: Citáty o lásce
Simone de Beauvoir citáty a výroky
Simone de Beauvoir: Citáty anglicky
Bk. 2, Pt.. 5, Ch. 2: The Mother, p. 522
The Second Sex (1949)
Kontext: The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength, each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence.
“The failure described in Being and Nothingness is definitive, but it is also ambiguous.”
Part I : Ambiguity and Freedom
The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
Kontext: The failure described in Being and Nothingness is definitive, but it is also ambiguous. Man, Sartre tells us, is “a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being.” That means, first of all, that his passion is not inflicted upon him from without. He chooses it. It is his very being and, as such, does not imply the idea of unhappiness. If this choice is considered as useless, it is because there exists no absolute value before the passion of man, outside of it, in relation to which one might distinguish the useless from the useful. The word “useful” has not yet received a meaning on the level of description where Being and Nothingness is situated. It can be defined only in the human world established by man’s projects and the ends he sets up. In the original helplessness from which man surges up, nothing is useful, nothing is useless. It must therefore be understood that the passion to which man has acquiesced finds no external justification. No outside appeal, no objective necessity permits of its being called useful. It has no reason to will itself. But this does not mean that it can not justify itself, that it can not give itself reasons for being that it does not have. And indeed Sartre tells us that man makes himself this lack of being in order that there might be being. The term in order that clearly indicates an intentionality. It is not in vain that man nullifies being. Thanks to him, being is disclosed and he desires this disclosure. There is an original type of attachment to being which is not the relationship “wanting to be” but rather “wanting to disclose being.” Now, here there is not failure, but rather success.
The world is his, time is his, and I'm nothing but an insect.
Regina to herself, p. 28
All Men are Mortal (1946)
“It is vain to apportion praise and blame.”
The Second Sex (1949)
Kontext: It is vain to apportion praise and blame. The truth is that if the vicious circle is so hard to break, it is because the two sexes are each the victim at once of the other and of itself. Between two adversaries confronting each other in their pure liberty, an agreement could be easily reached: the more so as the war profits neither. But the complexity of the whole affair derives from the fact that each camp is giving aid and comfort to the enemy; woman is pursuing a dream of submission, man a dream of identification. Want of authenticity does not pay: each blames the other for the unhappiness he or she has incurred in yielding to the temptations of the easy way; what man and woman loathe in each other is the shattering frustration of each one's own bad faith and baseness.
Zdroj: All Men are Mortal (1946), p. 201
Kontext: What did today's sacrifices matter: the Universe lay ahead in the future. What did burnings at the stake and massacres matter? The Universe was somewhere else, always somewhere else! And it isn't anywhere: there are only men, men eternally divided.
“In horror, in terror, she accepted the metamorphosis — gnat, foam, ant, until death.”
Last lines
All Men are Mortal (1946)
Kontext: In horror, in terror, she accepted the metamorphosis — gnat, foam, ant, until death. And it's only the beginning, she thought. She stood motionless, as if it were possible to play tricks with time, possible to stop it from following its course. But her hands stiffened against her quivering lips.
When the bells began to sound the hour she let out the first scream.
“From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.”
Part I : Ambiguity and Freedom
The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
Kontext: From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity. It was by affirming the irreducible character of ambiguity that Kierkegaard opposed himself to Hegel, and it is by ambiguity that, in our own generation, Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, fundamentally defined man, that being whose being is not to be, that subjectivity which realizes itself only as a presence in the world, that engaged freedom, that surging of the for-oneself which is immediately given for others. But it is also claimed that existentialism is a philosophy of the absurd and of despair. It encloses man in a sterile anguish, in an empty subjectivity. It is incapable of furnishing him with any principle for making choices. Let him do as he pleases. In any case, the game is lost. Does not Sartre declare, in effect, that man is a “useless passion,” that he tries in vain to realize the synthesis of the for-oneself and the in-oneself, to make himself God? It is true. But it is also true that the most optimistic ethics have all begun by emphasizing the element of failure involved in the condition of man; without failure, no ethics; for a being who, from the very start, would be an exact co-incidence with himself, in a perfect plenitude, the notion of having-to-be would have no meaning. One does not offer an ethics to a God. It is impossible to propose any to man if one defines him as nature, as something given. The so-called psychological or empirical ethics manage to establish themselves only by introducing surreptitiously some flaw within the manthing which they have first defined.
As quoted in Bisexual Characters in Film: From Anaïs to Zee (1997) by Wayne M. Bryant, p. 143
Attributed
[C]'est la vraie générosité ; vous donnez tout et rien ne semble jamais vous coûter.
All Men are Mortal (1946)
As quoted in Successful Aging : A Conference Report (1974) by Eric Pfeiffer, p. 142
Attributed
“All oppression creates a state of war”
Conclusion http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/ch04.htm, p. 717
Zdroj: The Second Sex (1949)
Kontext: All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception. The existent who is regarded as inessential cannot fail to demand the re-establishment of her sovereignty.
Today the combat takes a different shape; instead of wishing to put man in a prison, woman endeavours to escape from one; she no longer seeks to drag him into the realms of immanence but to emerge, herself, into the light of transcendence.
All Said and Done (1972), p. 16 ISBN 1569249814
General sources
“… her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.”
Zdroj: The Second Sex
“I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.”
The Blood of Others [Le sang des autres] (1946)
General sources
“She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust.”
Zdroj: The Mandarins
“Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.”
Zdroj: The Second Sex
“Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.”
Attributed
Zdroj: As quoted in The Book of Positive Quotations (2007) by John Cook, p. 548
“What would Prince Charming have for occupation if he had not to awaken the Sleeping beauty?”
Zdroj: The Second Sex
Part I : Ambiguity and Freedom
The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
Varianta: Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting
Kontext: In spite of so many stubborn lies, at every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men. There was Stalingrad and there was Buchenwald, and neither of the two wipes out the other. Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting [C'est dans la connaissance des conditions authentiques de notre vie qu'il nous faut puiser la force de vivre et des raisons d'agir].
“If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it "a discussion”
Zdroj: The Second Sex
