Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

216 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.
Quoted by Beauvoir as the watchword of the new feminism

Simone de Beauvoir
One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.

Simone de Beauvoir
To "catch" a husband is an art; to "hold" him is a job.

Simone de Beauvoir
To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.

Simone de Beauvoir
The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.

Simone de Beauvoir
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.

Simone de Beauvoir
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
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
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
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
There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.

Simone de Beauvoir
I'm never afraid. But in my case it's nothing to be proud of.

Simone de Beauvoir
The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it.

Simone de Beauvoir
The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.

Simone de Beauvoir
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
History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.

Simone de Beauvoir
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.

Simone de Beauvoir
And indeed, 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.

Simone de Beauvoir
Christian ideology has contributed no little to the oppression of woman.

Simone de Beauvoir
There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.

Simone de Beauvoir
The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation.

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

Simone de Beauvoir
Every time a man dies, a child dies too, and an adolescent and a young man as well; everyone weeps for the one who was dear to him.

Simone de Beauvoir
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?

Simone de Beauvoir
The present enshrines the past—and in the past all history has been made by men.

Simone de Beauvoir
All agree in recognising the fact that females exist in the human species; today as always they make up about one half of humanity. And yet we are told that femininity is in danger; we are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women. It would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity.

Simone de Beauvoir
When an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior. But the significance of the verb to be must be rightly understood here; it is in bad faith to give it a static value when it really has the dynamic Hegelian sense of "to have become." Yes, women on the whole are today inferior to men; that is, their situation affords them fewer possibilities. The question is: should that state of affairs continue?
Many men hope that it will continue; not all have given up the battle.

Simone de Beauvoir