Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

Any good practical philosophy must start out with the recognition of our having a body.

The body is our general medium for having a world.

The actuality of all of material Nature is therefore kept out of action and that of all corporeality along with it, including the actuality of my body, the body of the cognizing subject.

[The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis.

For real human beings, the only realism is an embodied realism.

The man who has the sense of the body being himself cannot possibly worship God as formless; whatever worship he makes will be worship in form alone, not otherwise.

The elemental world we all live in is the darkness of the body.

Human perception is literally incarnation.

We do not "have" a body; rather, we "are" bodily.

The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.

A mind is so closely shaped by the body and destined to serve it that only one mind could possibly arise in it. No body, never mind.

We live equally out of our bodies and out of our minds.

How did we get into this funny-looking body that has a hole at one end in which we regularly stuff dead plants and animals? It's bizarre that we got here, incarnated into this world with these bodies.

I am not in front of my body, I am in it or rather I am it... If we can still speak of interpretation in relation to the perception of one's own body, we shall have to say that it interprets itself.

Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument. And when we wish to move about, we do not move the body as we move an object.

I don’t have a body, I am a body.

The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body.

The difficulty is to learn to perceive with your whole body, not with just your eyes and reason. The world becomes a stream of tremendously rapid, unique events. So you must trim your body to make it a good receptor. The body is an awareness; and it must be treated impeccably.

The texture of experience is prior to everything else.

The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.

Only in the 20th century, artists started taking the study of perception in a more humane way. They were thinking about the eye as being an instrument, the whole body as being a visual instrument. That sort of gave way a little bit with Cartesian­ - the "Cogito ergo sum" argument. It's not, "I think therefore I exist." It's, "I feel therefore I think therefore I exist."

Without awareness of bodily feeling and attitude, a person becomes split into a disembodied spirit and a disenchanted body.

We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body.

Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.

The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.