Top 100 Beauvoir's Quotes
#1. In Beauvoir's experience Darwin was way wrong. The fittest didn't survive, they were killed by the idiocy of their neighbors, who continued to bumble along oblivious.
Louise Penny
#2. When I was writing Green Girl,I was reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, and she's very dismissive of the young girl. She writes about the girl as being from this space of bad faith and blankness. I'm more interested in a messy space.
Kate Zambreno
#3. Let every man shovel out his own snow, and the whole city will be passable," said Gamache. Seeing Beauvoir's puzzled expression he added, "Emerson."
"Lake and Palmer?"
"Ralph and Waldo.
Louise Penny
#4. in Beauvoir's experience losers were the most dangerous people. Because eventually they got to the stage where they had nothing more to lose.
Louise Penny
#5. 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
#6. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#7. The Social Security's medical consultants support the interest not of the victims but of the organization.
Simone De Beauvoir
#8. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#9. I don't agree with a core statement by most feminists, the statement by Simone de Beauvoir: "One is not born a woman, one becomes one." Even as a schoolgirl I wasn't convinced by the claim that gender has nothing to do with biology and is only shaped by one's environment.
Kristina Schroder
#10. A woman's situation, i.e those meanings derived from the total context in which she comes to maturity, disposes her to apprehend her body not as instrument of her transcendence, but an object destined for another.
Simone De Beauvoir
#11. What do you believe in ?"
"People's sufferings, and the fact that it is abominable. One should do everything to abolish it. To tell you the truth, nothing else seems to me of any importance.
Simone De Beauvoir
#12. Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.
Simone De Beauvoir
#13. 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
#14. That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.
Simone De Beauvoir
#15. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#17. Why does one exist? That's not my problem. One does exist. The thing to do is to take no notice but go at it on the run and to keep on going right on until you die.
Simone De Beauvoir
#18. To adapt one's outlook to another person's salvation is the surest and quickest way of losing him.
Simone De Beauvoir
#19. The American woman's inequality with men is proved by her defiant attitude.
Simone De Beauvoir
#20. And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.
Simone De Beauvoir
#21. The state of emotional intoxication allows one to grasp existence in one's self and in the other, as both subjectivity and passivity. The two partners merge in this ambiguous unity; each one is freed of his own presence and achieves immediate communication with the other.
Simone De Beauvoir
#22. Being on the fringes of the world is not the best place for someone who intends to re-create it: here again, to go beyond the given, one must be deeply rooted in it. Personal accomplishments are almost impossible in human categories collectively kept in an inferior situation.
Simone De Beauvoir
#23. It is doubtless impossible to approach any human problems with a mind free from bias.
Simone De Beauvoir
#26. 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
#27. The passionate man seeks possession; he seeks to attain being. The failure and the hell which he creates for himself have been described often enough. He causes certain rare treasures to appear in the world, but he also
Simone De Beauvoir
#28. Charity is all very nice,but people want to get something out of it.That's the principle of charity affairs.
Simone De Beauvoir
#29. If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it a discussion
Simone De Beauvoir
#30. No one saves an e-mail, because it's so inherently impersonal. I worry about posterity in general. All the great love letters - from Simone de Beauvoir to Sartre, from Samuel Clemens to his wife, Olivia - I don't know, I always think about what will be lost -
Gillian Flynn
#31. The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation.
Simone De Beauvoir
#32. One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others.
Simone De Beauvoir
#33. If she could inherit, she would thus wrongly transmit her paternal family's riches to that of her husband: she is carefully excluded from the succession.
Simone De Beauvoir
#34. There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.
Simone De Beauvoir
#35. I was very fond of Lagneau's phrase: I have no comfort but in my absolute despair.
Simone De Beauvoir
#36. 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
#37. It's very hard to review one's past without cheating a little.
Simon De Beauvoir
#39. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#40. If you point out that they're walking in shit they scream it's you that have dirty feet.
Simone De Beauvoir
#41. And Beauvoir knew then the man was a saint. He's been touched by any number of medical men and women. All healers, all well intentioned, some kind, some rough. All made it clear they wanted him to live, but none had made him feel that his life was precious, was worth saving, was worth something.
Louise Penny
#42. To lose confidence in one's body is to lose confidence in oneself.
Simone De Beauvoir
#43. 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
#44. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#45. 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
#46. It's true that what you find in New York is something other than America. Only small towns and small countries are self-satisfied; a real capital goes beyond its borders.
Simone De Beauvoir
#47. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#49. 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
#50. This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.
Simone De Beauvoir
#51. Women's mutual understanding comes from the fact that they identify themselves with each other; but for the same reason each is against the others.
Simone De Beauvoir
#53. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#54. 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
#55. We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible.
Simone De Beauvoir
#56. The most scandalous aspect of any scandal is that one gets used to it.
Simone De Beauvoir
#57. 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
#58. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#59. Everyone seemed to think that violence was an acceptable risk and a foregone conclusion for prostitutes, call girls and streetwalkers alike. There was almost an air of, well, what did she expect? What did she expect, indeed? To be allowed to live?
Jeannette De Beauvoir
#60. I'm not against mothers. I am against the ideology which expects every woman to have children, and I'm against the circumstances under which mothers have to have their children.
Simone De Beauvoir
#61. 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
#62. Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.
Simone De Beauvoir
#63. They use the pretext of avoiding war, to make you swallow any kind of peace, said Paul. They use the pretext of a revolution to involve us in any kind of war, said Jardinet.
Simone De Beauvoir
#64. History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.
Simone De Beauvoir
#65. Vengeance is pointless, but certain men did not have a place in the world we sought to construct
Simone De Beauvoir
#67. Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.
Simone De Beauvoir
#68. 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
#69. Primitive people alienate themselves in their mana, their totem; civilized people in their individual souls, their egos, their names, their possessions, and their work: here is the first temptation of inauthenticity.
Simone De Beauvoir
#70. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#71. Beauvoir was untouched by the criticisms; her diary was a record of one consciousness, her own: "This is what I saw and how I saw it. I have not tried to say more.
Alice Kaplan
#72. Marriage is a career which brings about more benefits than many others.
Simone De Beauvoir
#73. But what does the word insist mean after a whole life of love and understanding? I have never asked anything for myself that I did not also wish for him.
Simone De Beauvoir
#74. The Communists , following Hegel , speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.
Simone De Beauvoir
#75. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.
Simone De Beauvoir
#81. The arrogance of some Christians would close heaven to them if, to their misfortune, it existed.
Simone De Beauvoir
#83. The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project
Simone De Beauvoir
#85. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#88. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#90. Yeti. Big Foot. There was some old creature his grandmother had told him about. The Green Man. Half man, half tree. This was him. Beauvoir gripped his stick.
Louise Penny
#92. By the time humankind reaches the stage of writing its mythology and laws, patriarchy is definitively established: it is males who write the codes.
Simone De Beauvoir
#93. To reject the notions of the eternal feminine, the black soul, or the Jewish character is not to deny that there are today Jews, blacks, or women: this denial is not a liberation for those concerned but an inauthentic flight.
Simone De Beauvoir
#94. I asked Isabelle whether she was happy. "I never ask myself, so I suppose the answer is yes." At all events she likes the moment of waking up. That seems to me a pretty good definition of happiness! It is the same with me: every morning, when I open my eyes, I smile.
Simone De Beauvoir
#96. The human species is forever in a state of change, forever becoming.
Simone De Beauvoir
#98. If you haven't been happy very young, you can still be happy later on, but it's much harder. You need more luck.
Simone De Beauvoir
#99. One of the problems he will seek to solve is how to make his wife both a servant and a companion; his attitude will evolve throughout the centuries, and this will also entail an evolution in woman's destiny.11
Simone De Beauvoir
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