Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

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

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

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

(About Sartre...)His death does not separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is ...

One is not born a genius one becomes a genius.

One is not born a woman - one becomes one.

To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them ...

Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiorit...

Being on the fringes of the world is not the best place for someone who intends to re-create it: her...

To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.

Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient.

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

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

But I was brought up on convent morals and paternal nationalism, I was getting bogged down in contra...

I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many...

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

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

What do you believe in ?""People's sufferings, and the fact that it is abominable. One should do eve...

Girls are weighed down by restrictions, boys with demands - two equally harmful disciplines.

Vengeance is pointless, but certain men do not have a place in the world we sought to construct

Vengeance is pointless, but certain men did not have a place in the world we sought to construct

It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, wher...

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

There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open f...

All oppression creates a state of war.

Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes bu...

The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that disti...

I’ve done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I’ve been swindled al...

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

That's what I consider true generosity. You give your all and yet you always feel as if it costs you...

I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me ...

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

Live with no time out.

The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anyth...

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

The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one.

Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just ...

One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others by means of love friend...

One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others by means of love friend...

Let women be provided with living strength of their own.

The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in sol...

In the old days the worst part of my depression used to be the astonishment it caused me, the scanda...

Yet I loathe the thought of annihilating myself quite as much now as I ever did. I think with sadnes...

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is...

Why shouldn't a mystical theology be possible? 'I want to touch God or become God,' I declared in my...

Jaques was only what he was; but from a distance he became something more, became everything to me, ...

I had to call the past to life, and illuminate every corner of the five continents, descend to the c...

I didn't know the first thing about the people around me, but that didn't matter: I was in a new wor...

The facts of religion were convincing only to those who were already convinced.

I was convinced that I would be, that I was already, one in a million.

All those minds that are interested in finding out the truth communicate with each other across the ...

One night I summoned God, if He really existed, to show Himself to me. He didn't, and I never addres...

Suddenly I was struck motionless: I was living through the first chapter of a novel in which I was t...

It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator burdened with all the c...

I was too much of an extremist to be able to live under the eye of God and at the same time say both...

Alone: for the first time I understood the terrible significance of that word. Alone without a witne...

The fear of death never left me; I couldn't get used to the thought; I would still sometimes shake a...

At night I would climb the steps to the Sacre-Coeur, and I would watch Paris, that futile oasis, sci...

The thing that attracted me about philosophy was that it went straight to essentials. I had never li...

If I were to share Jaques' existence I would find it hard to hold my own against him, for already I ...

There were no scruples, no feelings of respect or loyal affection that would stop us from making up ...

To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to conv...

Trudging alone along that black road, sometimes in the teeth of wind and rain, and watching the whit...

All she had to do was make the simplest of gestures - open her hands and let go her hold. She lifted...

Have you ever felt in your inmost being, the conscience of others?' again she was trembling, the wor...

They use the pretext of avoiding war, to make you swallow any kind of peace, said Paul. They use the...

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

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

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

A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the re...

My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy.

Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity.

The present is a transitory existence which is made in order to be abolished: it retrieves itself on...

But an action which wants to serve man ought to be careful not to forget him on the way, if it choos...

Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his ...

To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, fa...

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of thei...

The continuous work of our life,” says Montaigne, “is to build death.” He quotes the Latin poets: Pr...

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself & in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itse...

We have to respect freedom only when it is intended for freedom, not when it strays, flees itself, a...

Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the ris...

In the face of an obstacle which it is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid. If I persist ...

I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water...

At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain tro...

But this element of failure is a very condition of his life; one can never dream of eliminating it w...

God! when you think of all the things you could do and yet somehow never do! All the opportunities y...

A normal existence - what could be more irrational? It's fantastic the number of things you're force...

The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming...

Scriassine studied me in turn. "You're not so dumb, you know. Generally I dislike intelligent women,...

He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people what I want is to show each of them how the ...

I hadn't known Chancel very well, but ten days earlier I had seen him laughing with the others aroun...

In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and complete...

Taking without being taken in the anguish of becoming prey is the dangerous game of adolescent femin...

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

Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms...

; the man who does not "understand" a woman is happy to replace his subjective deficiency with an ob...

The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal...

The little girl feels that her body is escaping her, that it is no longer the clear expression of he...

: woman is an eminently poetic reality since man projects onto her everything he is not resolved to ...

The relation of woman to husband, of daughter to father, of sister to brother, is a relation of vass...

We will not let ourselves be intimidated by the number and violence of attacks against women; nor be...