The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir
Top 10 Best Quotes
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
“...her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.”
“No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.”
“When she does not find love, she may find poetry. Because she does not act, she observes, she feels, she records; a color, a smile awakens profound echoes within her; her destiny is outside her, scattered in cities already built, on the faces of men already marked by life, she makes contact, she relishes with passion and yet in a manner more detached, more free, than that of a young man. Being poorly integrated in the universe of humanity and hardly able to adapt herself therein, she, like the child, is able to see it objectively; instead of being interested solely in her grasp on things, she looks for their significance; she catches their special outlines, their unexpected metamorphoses. She rarely feels a bold creativeness, and usually she lacks the technique of self-expression; but in her conversation, her letters, her literary essays, her sketches, she manifests an original sensitivity. The young girl throws herself into things with ardor, because she is not yet deprived of her transcendence; and the fact that she accomplishes nothing, that she is nothing, will make her impulses only the more passionate. Empty and unlimited, she seeks from within her nothingness to attain All.”
“All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception.”
“Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.”
“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.”
“The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project”
“If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it "a discussion”
“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)”
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Book Keywords:
theoretical, love, relationships, sisyphus, philosophy, feminism, repetition, freedom, housework