Simone de Beauvoir

Margaret A. Simons

Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir

Barbara Klaw

"Revelatory insights into the early life and thought of the preeminent French feminist philosopher. Dating from her years as a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, this is the 1926-27 diary of the teenager who would become the famous French philosopher, author, and feminist, Simone de Beauvoir. Written years before her first meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre, these diaries reveal previously unknown details about her life and offer critical insights into her early philosophy and literary works. Presented here for the first time in translation and fully annotated, the diary is completed by essays from Barbara Klaw and Margaret A. Simons that address its philosophical, historical and literary significance. The volume represents an invaluable resource for tracing the development of Beauvoir's independent thinking and influence on the world."--Publisher's description.

Diary of a Philosophy Student: 1926-27

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Another part of Beauvoir's legacy of self-love to all who aspire to be in a relationship with a significant other is her awareness that she must continue to honor her own dreams and aspirations even when she is in a couple. Each individual in a couple has to remain at the center of an individual universe that will, in the ideal relationship, happily intersect with their partner's. Without this, the love relationship fails.

“No, no pity for my vanished past. Live in the present. It is beautiful enough if I know how to make it so.”

“If you [Jacques] were present, I would not be so scrupulously seeking how I love you.”

“Paris, with its ever similar and yet new attractions, beloved Paris where the life of others is so mysterious and powerful, and so much your domain, Jacques, that to walk there is to live in you.”

“One by one the past days when I loved you so are repeated by present days and fall away. I am not suffering. I remember you. I do not have the strength to go to you. I stop at the void within me; and to fill it I speak, without seeing him clearly , to my life's companion who is present, I know—without believing too much in what I know because one cannot really know life when one is not living.”

“One day , I too will tell you things, Jacques, some things that will make you smile, and others so that you will not smile. You taught me not to be the humorless and defiant intellectual I might have been—you taught me the gravity of beautiful things—you taught me the sweetness of not being alone—you taught me the grace of life. Your image slips away when I try to grasp it, but I know , I know…”

“You are the only one, you see, who has ever known how to love me, who took me as a totality, without diminishing me in order to love me. You accept my intelligence, but you also accept the torment that it has been for me—and my destitute heart, and also all the other bits of me that the others don't see.”

“…I was suffering from letting that power of love be stifled by my disgust—but now, despite everything, the feeling of wanting to live all my life with love triumphs.”

“But now I understand that it is also because I was stifling underneath a sorrow whose face I did not recognize; not melancholy, nor tears, nor complacency; but this madness for diversion, this liking for passionate and vulgar presences, this feverish indifference, it was another unexpected form of sorrow.”

“She said no, and still between them there was this profound affection. And when she recounted this, with all of her soul, she was as beautiful as purity, as beautiful as intelligence and love. And silently I gave her a bit of my true self that I had previously decided not to reveal; I made her enter my true life; she is someone with whom not only to be happy, but also with whom to remember and cry.”

Diary of a Philosophy Student: 1926-27 quotes

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