Top 100 Simone De Beauvoir Quotes
#1. How will the fact of being women have affected our lives? What precise opportunities have been given us, and which ones have been denied? What destiny awaits our younger sisters, and in which direction should we point them?
Simone De Beauvoir
#2. As far as I am concerned sexuality no longer exists. I used to call this indifference serenity: all at once I have come to see it in another light - it is a mutilation; it is the loss of a sense. The lack of it makes me blind to the needs, the pains, and the joys of those who do possess it.
Simone De Beauvoir
#3. The truth is, however, that when two individuals detest each other, while being unable to get along without each other, it is not of all human relations the truest and most moving, but rather the most pitiable.
Simone De Beauvoir
#4. For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay.
Simone De Beauvoir
#5. I should like this sky, this quiet water, to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me.
Simone De Beauvoir
#6. Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness.
Simone De Beauvoir
#7. We will not let ourselves be intimidated by the number and violence of attacks against women; nor be fooled by the self-serving praise showered on the "real woman"; nor be won over by men's enthusiasm for her destiny, a destiny they would not for the world want to share.
Simone De Beauvoir
#8. Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
Simone De Beauvoir
#9. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#10. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#11. To paint, to write, to engage in politics - these are not merely 'sublimations'; here we have aims that are willed for their own sakes. To deny it is to falsify all human history.
Simone De Beauvoir
#12. He would talk and talk and talk; the twilight would fill with cigarette smoke and shimmering words would tremble in the blue coils of air...
Simone De Beauvoir
#13. If I had rediscovered in Heaven, amplified to infinity, the monstrous alliance of fragility and implacability, of caprice and artificial necessity which had oppressed me since my birth, rather than worship Him I would have chosen damnation.
Simone De Beauvoir
#15. That a whole part of the middle class detests me ... is utterly normal. I would be troubled if the contrary were true.
Simone De Beauvoir
#16. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#17. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#18. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#19. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#20. A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.
Simone De Beauvoir
#22. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#23. Have you ever felt in your inmost being, the conscience of others?' again she was trembling, the words were not releasing her. 'It's intolerable you know
Simone De Beauvoir
#24. Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside
from others. We do not accept it willingly.
Simone De Beauvoir
#25. The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty ... Only a moral revolution
not a social or a political revolution
only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.
Simone De Beauvoir
#26. Doomed to procreation and secondary tasks, stripped of her practical importance and her mystical prestige, woman becomes no more than a servant.
Simone De Beauvoir
#27. So not every female human being is necessarily a woman; she must take part in this mysterious and endangered reality known as femininity. Is femininity secreted by the ovaries? Is it enshrined in a Platonic heaven?
Simone De Beauvoir
#28. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#29. 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)
Simone De Beauvoir
#31. What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.
Simone De Beauvoir
#32. The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.
Simone De Beauvoir
#33. Which we welcomed precisely because it happened to suit our convenience.
Simone De Beauvoir
#34. The Social Security's medical consultants support the interest not of the victims but of the organization.
Simone De Beauvoir
#36. To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.
Simone De Beauvoir
#37. 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?
Simone De Beauvoir
#38. Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly. Let but the future be opened to her, and she will no longer be compelled to linger in the present.
Simone De Beauvoir
#39. Old age is better for women than for men. First of all, they have less far to fall, since their lives are more mediocre than those of most men.
Simone De Beauvoir
#40. Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.
Simone De Beauvoir
#41. Man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it.
Simone De Beauvoir
#42. (About Sartre ... )
His death does not separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are. It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long.
Simone De Beauvoir
#43. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#44. I've done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I've been swindled all the same because it's never anything more.
Simone De Beauvoir
#45. The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy ... It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present.
Simone De Beauvoir
#46. Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me
Simone De Beauvoir
#47. To give space when what one most yearns for is closeness, that is both the great test and great tragedy of love.
Simone De Beauvoir
#48. The sin of smiling whilst Louise was weeping, the sin of shedding my own tears and not hers. The sin of being another being.
Simone De Beauvoir
#49. What would Prince Charming have for occupation if he had not to awaken the Sleeping beauty?
Simone De Beauvoir
#50. My overflowing leisure handed me the world and at the same time prevented me from seeing it. Just as the sun, filtering through the closed venetian blinds on a hot afternoon, makes the whole magnificence of summer blaze in my mind; whereas if I face its direct harsh glare it blinds me.
Simone De Beauvoir
#52. But it is impossible for anyone to say 'I am sacrificing myself' without feeling bitterness.
Simone De Beauvoir
#55. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#56. But the answer is obvious: it is easy to believe one is sovereign when alone, to believe oneself strong when carefully refusing to bear any burden.
Simone De Beauvoir
#58. They don't like being seen through: as for me I'm straight I don't join their act I tear masks off.
Simone De Beauvoir
#61. The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady, yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet.
Simone De Beauvoir
#62. Nature asserts itself in the face of Spirit which it denies while assuming it; the individual is again found in the collectivity within which he is lost; & each man's death is fulfilled by being cancelled out into the Life of Mankind.
Simone De Beauvoir
#63. It is not mere chance that makes families speak of a child who is 'extraordinary for his age' and also of an old man who is 'extraordinary for his age'; the extraordinariness lies in their behaving like human beings when they are either not yet or no longer men.
Simone De Beauvoir
#64. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#65. The innumerable conflicts that set men and women against one another come from the fact that neither is prepared to assume all the consequences of this situation which the one has offered and the other accepted.
Simone De Beauvoir
#66. When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.
Simone De Beauvoir
#67. No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.
Simone De Beauvoir
#68. The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.
Simone De Beauvoir
#69. Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.
Simone De Beauvoir
#71. When he describes woman, each writer discloses his general ethics and the special idea he has of himself; and in her he often betrays also the gap between his world view and his egotistical dreams.
Simone De Beauvoir
#72. Surviving one's own life, living on the other side of it like a spectator, is quite comfortable after all. You no longer expect anything, no longer fear anything, and every hour is like a memory.
Simone De Beauvoir
#73. Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death.
Simone De Beauvoir
#75. To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.
Simone De Beauvoir
#76. To lose confidence in one's body is to lose confidence in oneself.
Simone De Beauvoir
#77. Between women love is contemplation; caresses are meant less to appropriate the other than to recreate oneself slowly through her; separation is eliminated, there is neither fight nor victory nor defeat; each one is both subject and object
Simone De Beauvoir
#78. But I was brought up on convent morals and paternal nationalism, I was getting bogged down in contradictions.
Simone De Beauvoir
#79. As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.
Simone De Beauvoir
#81. There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial ... Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost ... I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself!
Simone De Beauvoir
#82. Suddenly I was struck motionless: I was living through the first chapter of a novel in which I was the heroine; she was still almost a child, but we, too, were growing up.
Simone De Beauvoir
#83. Today I believe that, under the specially privileged conditions in which I exist, life contains two main truths which we must face simultaneously, and between which there is no choice - the joy of being, the horror of being no more.
Simone De Beauvoir
#84. He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!
Simone De Beauvoir
#85. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#86. Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.
Simone De Beauvoir
#87. A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong.
Simone De Beauvoir
#88. The fact is that a true human privilege is based upon the anatomical privilege only in virtue of the total situation. Psychoanalysis can establish its truths only in the historical context.
Simone De Beauvoir
#89. There is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.
Simone De Beauvoir
#90. I was too much of an extremist to be able to live under the eye of God and at the same time say both yes and no to life
Simone De Beauvoir
#91. I had to call the past to life, and illuminate every corner of the five continents, descend to the centre of the earth and make the circuit of the moon and stars
Simone De Beauvoir
#93. I would have to have a bit of heroism and get out of myself. But I love myself so much!
Simone De Beauvoir
#94. I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing.
Simone De Beauvoir
#95. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#97. If I want to define myself, I first have to say, "I am a woman"; all other assertions will arise from this basic truth. A man never begins by positing himself as an individual of a certain sex: that he is a man is obvious.
Simone De Beauvoir
#99. Charity is all very nice,but people want to get something out of it.That's the principle of charity affairs.
Simone De Beauvoir
#100. One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.
Simone De Beauvoir
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