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.

Habit has a kind of poetry.

When Goya was 80 he drew an ancient man propped on two sticks, with a great mass of white hair and beard all over his face, and the inscription, "I am still learning."

One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, "I will always be here.

I willingly trust myself to chance. I let my thoughts wander, I digress, not only sitting at my work, but all day long, all night even. It often happens that a sentence suddenly runs through my head before I go to bed, or when I am unable to sleep, and I get up again and write it down.

there is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.

Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction ...

Many things would be changed for Americans if they would only admit that there is ill-luck in this world and that misfortune is not a priori a crime.

Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.

The individuals who seem to us most outstanding, who are honored with the name of genius, are those who have proposed to enact the fate of all humanity in their personal existences.

It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.

Cooking is revolution and creation ...

Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word. Machines won't change human nature.

The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.

It's frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself. It seems unfair. You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do --or don't do.

Work almost always has a double aspect: it is a bondage, a wearisome drudgery; but it is also a source of interest, a steadying element, a factor that helps to integrate the worker with society. Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.

It's only arrogance if you're wrong.

The nearer I come to the end of my days, the more I am enabled to see that strange thing, a life, and to see it whole ...

The Communists , following Hegel , speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.

I was struck by the absence, even among very young boys and girls, of any interior motivation; they were incapable of thinking, of inventing, of imagining, of choosing, of deciding for themselves; this incapacity was expressed by their conformism; in every domain of life they employed only the abstract measure of money, because they were unable to trust to their own judgment.

When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.

To will freedom and to will to disclose being are one and the same choice; hence, freedom takes a positive and constructive step which causes being to pass to existence in a movement which is constantly surpassed.

It is impossible to do anything for anyone.

it is only on posters and in advertisement pages that Americans have those chubby cheeks, expanding smiles, smooth looks, and faces flushed with well-being. In fact, almost all are at odds with themselves; drink offers a remedy for this inner malady of which boredom is the most usual sign: as drinking is accepted by society, it does not appear as a sign of their [Americans'] inability to adapt themselves; it is rather the adapted form of inadaptability.

La femme?sait que quand on la regarde on ne la distingue pas de son apparence: elle est juge e, respecte e, de sire e a' travers sa toilette. Woman?knows that when she is looked at she is not considered apart from her appearance: she is judged, respected, desired, by and through her toilette.

Ce n'est gue' re que dans les asiles que les coquettes gardent avec ente" tement une foi entie' re en des regards absents; normalement, elles re clament des te moins. Women fond of dress are hardly ever entirely satisfied not to be seen, except among the insane; usually they want witnesses.

from one minute to the next the present is merely an honorary past. It must be filled unceasingly anew to dissemble the curse it carries within itself; that is why Americans like speed, alcohol, thriller films and any sensational news: the demand for new things, and ever newer things, is feverish since nowhere will they rest.

On the evenings when my parents held parties, the drawing-room mirrors multiplied to infinity the scintillations of a crystal chandelier. Mama would take her seat at the grand piano to accompany a lady dressed in a cloud of tulle who played the violin and a cousin who performed on a cello. I would crack between my teeth the candied shell of an artificial fruit, and a burst of light would illuminate my palate with a taste of blackcurrant or pineapple: all the colours, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held the whole party in my mouth.

One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.

The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.

Buying is profound pleasure.

Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.

Tragedies are all right for a while: you are concerned, you are curious, you feel good. And then it gets repetitive, it doesn't advance, it grows dreadfully boring: it is so very boring, even for me.

A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: 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; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.

It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.

Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness.

Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.

--There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time. --But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.

To give space when what one most yearns for is closeness, that is both the great test and great tragedy of love.

The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself.

She was trying to get rid of a religious hangover.

She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life.

From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.

We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible.

Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.

A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong.

There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.

If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through "the eternal feminine," and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman?

I don't want to be just another blade of grass.

To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simpily an all-pervasive system.

It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency.

Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.

It must be said in addition that the men with the most scrupulous respect for embryonic life are also those who are most zealous when it comes to condemning adults to death in war.

There are cases where the slave does not know his servitude and where it is necessary to bring the seed of his liberation to him from the outside: his submission is not enough to justify the tyranny which is imposed upon him.

Live with no time-out.

Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours...

Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.

Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.

The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.

The individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of himself.

Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.

Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom.

Old age is life's parody.

Marriage is traditionally the destiny offered to women by society. Most women are married or have been, or plan to be or suffer from not being.

It is for man to establish the reign of liberty in the midst of the world of the given. To gain the supreme victory, it is necessary, for one thing, that by and through their natural differentiation men and women unequivocally affirm their brotherhood.

Ah, if only there were two of me, she thought, one who spoke and the other who listened, one who lived and one who watched, how I would love myself! I would envy no one.

Françoise could not help taking a surreptitious glance at Xavière: she gave a start of amazement. Xavière was no longer watching, her head was lowered. Françoise barely suppressed a scream. The girl was pressing the lighted end against her skin, a bitter smile curling her lips. It was an intimate, solitary smile, like that of a half-wit; the voluptuous, tortured smile of a woman possessed of some secret pleasure.

There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.' There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me.

Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.