Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

216 Sourced Quotes

It's very hard to review one's past without cheating a little.

Simone de Beauvoir
The American woman's inequality with men is proved by her defiant attitude.

Simone de Beauvoir
He was living like an engineer in a mechanical world. No wonder he had become dry as a stone.

Simone de Beauvoir
Between women love is contemplative; caresses are intended less to gain possession of the other than gradually to re-create the self through her; separateness is abolished, there is no struggle, no victory, no defeat; in exact reciprocity each is at once subject and object, sovereign and slave; duality become mutuality.

Simone de Beauvoir
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
It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.

Simone de Beauvoir
The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.

Simone de Beauvoir
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
I was struck by the absence, even among very young boys and girls, of any interior motivation; they were incapable of thinking, of inventing, of imagining, of choosing, of deciding for themselves; this incapacity was expressed by their conformism; in every domain of life they employed only the abstract measure of money, because they were unable to trust to their own judgment.

Simone de Beauvoir
No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.

Simone de Beauvoir
Christianity gave eroticism its savor of sin and legend when it endowed the human female with a soul.

Simone de Beauvoir
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
It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.

Simone de Beauvoir
Every time I start on a new book, I am a beginner again. I doubt myself, I grow discouraged, all the work accomplished in the past is as though it never was, my first drafts are so shapeless that it seems impossible to go on with the attempt at all, right up until the moment - always imperceptible, there, too, there is a break - when it is has become impossible not to finish it.

Simone de Beauvoir
Jealousy is not contemptible, real love has a beak and claws.

Simone de Beauvoir
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
Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself.

Simone de Beauvoir
There are cases where the slave does not know his servitude and where it is necessary to bring the seed of his liberation to him from the outside: his submission is not enough to justify the tyranny which is imposed upon him.

Simone de Beauvoir
I willingly trust myself to chance. I let my thoughts wander, I digress, not only sitting at my work, but all day long, all night even. It often happens that a sentence suddenly runs through my head before I go to bed, or when I am unable to sleep, and I get up again and write it down.

Simone de Beauvoir
It must be said in addition that the men with the most scrupulous respect for embryonic life are also those who are most zealous when it comes to condemning adults to death in war.

Simone de Beauvoir
Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one being active and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one.

Simone de Beauvoir
Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.

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

Simone de Beauvoir
The women of today are in a fair way to dethrone the myth of femininity; they are beginning to affirm their independence in concrete ways; but they do not easily succeed in living completely the life of a human being.

Simone de Beauvoir
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
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
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.

Simone de Beauvoir
After wars peace, after peace, another war. Every day men are born and others die.

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
He had not applauded, he had remained seated, but he had looked at her steadily. From the depths of eternity he had looked at her and Rosalind became immortal. If I could believe him, she thought, if only I could believe him!

Simone de Beauvoir