Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

216 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Simone de Beauvoir
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
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
Words have to murder reality before they can hold it captive.

Simone de Beauvoir
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
I would stand transfixed before the windows of the confectioners' shops, fascinated by the luminous sparkle of candied fruits, the cloudy lustre of jellies, the kaleidoscope

Simone de Beauvoir
A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.

Simone de Beauvoir
Religion could do no more for my mother than the hope of posthumous success could do for me. Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.

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
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
Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word.

Simone de Beauvoir
A conquest of this kind is never finished; the contingency remains, and, so that he may assert his will, man is even obliged to stir up in the world the outrage he does not want. But this element of failure is a very condition of his life; one can never dream of eliminating it without immediately dreaming of death. This does not mean that one should consent to failure, but rather one must consent to struggle against it without respite.

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

Simone de Beauvoir
Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.

Simone de Beauvoir
When Sartre and I met not only did our backgrounds fuse, but also our solidity, our individual conviction that we were what we were made to be. In that framework we could not become rivals. Then, as the relationship between Sartre and me grew, I became convinced that I was irreplaceable in his life, and he in mine. In other words, we were totally secure in the knowledge that our relationship was also totally solid, again preordained, though, of course, we would have laughed at that word then. When you have such security it's easy not to be jealous. But had I thought that another woman played the same role as I did in Sartre's life, of course, I would have been jealous.

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
We were two of a kind, and our relationship would endure as long as we did: but it could not make up entirely for the fleeting riches to be had from encounters with different people.

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

Simone de Beauvoir
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