Top 100 Quotes About Simone De Beauvoir
#1. When I was 17, I was at La Coupole brasserie, and Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir asked me to join them at their table. They were fascinated that I'd watched their programme on existentialism back home and wanted to understand nothingness and being.
Jerry Hall
#2. 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
#3. Simone de Beauvoir believed adolescence is when girls realize that men have the power and that their only power comes from consenting to become submissive adored objects. They do not suffer from the penis envy Freud postulated, but from power envy.
Mary Pipher
#4. When Simone de Beauvoir said, "One is not born a woman - one becomes one," she didn't know the half of it. In
Caitlin Moran
#5. 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
#6. For a woman to be taken as seriously as a man she must be three times as effective. Happily, this is not difficult.
Simone de Beauvoir
Gale Martin
#7. There was a French activist and writer, Simone de Beauvoir, who said, 'You are not born woman. You become one' ... Words I live by.
Bruce Jenner
#8. I am not a great French woman. George Sand, Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir are great French women.
Juliette Binoche
#9. 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
#11. 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
#12. The Communists , following Hegel , speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.
Simone De Beauvoir
#13. 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
#14. Marriage is a career which brings about more benefits than many others.
Simone De Beauvoir
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#20. 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
#21. History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.
Simone De Beauvoir
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. The most scandalous aspect of any scandal is that one gets used to it.
Simone De Beauvoir
#29. We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible.
Simone De Beauvoir
#30. 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
#31. Vengeance is pointless, but certain men did not have a place in the world we sought to construct
Simone De Beauvoir
#33. 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
#34. 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
#36. The human species is forever in a state of change, forever becoming.
Simone De Beauvoir
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#46. 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
#48. 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
#50. The arrogance of some Christians would close heaven to them if, to their misfortune, it existed.
Simone De Beauvoir
#51. To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.
Simone De Beauvoir
#52. 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
#53. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#60. It is doubtless impossible to approach any human problems with a mind free from bias.
Simone De Beauvoir
#61. 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
#62. It is true that nothing is gained without something being lost: everyone knows that in fulfilling oneself one necessarily sacrifices some possibilities.
Simone De Beauvoir
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#66. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#67. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#68. 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
#69. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#76. 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
#77. When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.
Simone De Beauvoir
#78. It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.
Simone De Beauvoir
#79. In the old days the worst part of my depression used to be the astonishment it caused me, the scandalized way in which I fought against it. Nowadays, on the other hand, I accept it cheerfully enough, like an old familiar friend.
Simone De Beauvoir
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other.
Simone De Beauvoir
#83. The American woman's inequality with men is proved by her defiant attitude.
Simone De Beauvoir
#85. To adapt one's outlook to another person's salvation is the surest and quickest way of losing him.
Simone De Beauvoir
#86. 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
#87. Love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity.
Simone De Beauvoir
#89. A man would never set out to write a book on the peculiar
situation of the human male. But if I wish to define myself, I
must first of all say: T am a woman
Simone De Beauvoir
#90. Man may reproach women for their dissimulation, but his complacency must be great indeed for him to be so constantly duped.
Simone De Beauvoir
#91. A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.
Simone De Beauvoir
#92. A writer is hoisted up onto a pedestal only to scrutinize him more closely and conclude that it was a mistake to put him up there in the first place.
Simone De Beauvoir
#93. 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
#94. The fear of death never left me; I couldn't get used to the thought; I would still sometimes shake and weep with terror. By contrast, the fact of existence here and now sometimes took on a glorious splendour.
Simone De Beauvoir
#96. Saint Thomas declared that woman was an "inessential" being, which, from a masculine point of view, is a way of positing the accidental character of sexuality.
Simone De Beauvoir
#97. 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
#98. 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.
Simone De Beauvoir
#99. Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity.
Simone De Beauvoir
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