Simone de Beauvoir Quotations

Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.

One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.

Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.

What is an adult? A child blown up by age.

It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.

To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.

Sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.

Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen.

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.

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.

If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.

One is not born a woman, but becomes one.

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.

Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.

Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.

No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.

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

This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.

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 the absolute truth.

Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.

When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.

To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.

The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.

In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.

All the idols made by man, however terrifying they may be, are in point of fact subordinate to him, and that is why he will always have it in his power to destroy them.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.

The women of today are in a fair way to dethrone the myth of femininity; they are beginning to affirm their independence in concrete ways; but they do not easily succeed in living completely the life of a human being.

The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.

Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.

I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself

All oppression creates a state of war.

Eating, sleeping, cleaning - the years no longer rise up toward heaven, they lie spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won. Washing, ironing, sweeping, ferreting out rolls of lint from under wardrobes - all this halting of decay is also the denial of life; for time simultaneously creates and destroys, and only its negative aspect concerns the housekeeper.

To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.

To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other...when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.

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

She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust.

However gifted an individual is at the outset, if his or her talents cannot be developed because of his or her social condition, because of the surrounding circumstances, these talents will be still-born.

My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together.

You have never had any confidence in him. And if he has no confidence in himself it is because he sees himself through your eyes.

I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.

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.

There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.

Patience is one of those feminine qualities which have their origin in our oppression but should be preserved after our liberation.

Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies.

Marriage is a career which brings about more benefits than many others.

When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].

On ne na|"t pas femme: on le devient. One is not born a woman: one becomes a woman.

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.

To show your true ability is always, in a sense, to surpass the limits of your ability, to go a little beyond them: to dare, to seek, to invent; it is at such a moment that new talents are revealed, discovered, and realized

It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.

There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.

No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.

When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.

In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.

...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.

A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself.

She offered her mouth to him, as if enchanted. A Persian princess, a little Indian, a fox, a morning glory, a lovely wisteria--it always pleased them when you told them they looked like something, like something else.

Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.

A life is such a strange object, at one moment translucent, at another utterly opaque, an object I make with my own hands, an object imposed on me, an object for which the world provides the raw material and then steals it from me again, pulverized by events, scattered, broken, scored yet retaining its unity; how heavy it is and how inconsistent: this contradiction breeds many misunderstandings.

Be loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody.

Let women be provided with living strength of their own.

A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into?

But women do not say 'We', except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say 'women', and women use the same word in referring to themselves.

The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.

I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.

The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation.

Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.

Buying is a profound pleasure.

That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.

The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it.

Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.

Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other.

If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it "a discussion

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.

People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls.

Society turns away from the aged worker as though he belonged to another species. That is why the whole question is buried in a conspiracy of silence. Old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization.

Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.

One can hardly tell women that washing up saucepans is their divine mission, [so] they are told that bringing up children is their divine mission. But the way things are in the world, bringing up children has a great deal in common with washing up saucepans.

The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady, yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet.

The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project

To be moral is to discover fundamentally ones own being.

The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.

The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another.

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.

Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive.

What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.

Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.

The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams.

My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.

The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or castle; it stands for permanence and separation from the world.

I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.

Each of us is responsible for everything and to every human being.

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)