Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

216 Sourced Quotes

Ah! if only there were two of me, one who spoke and the other who listened, one who lived and the other who watched, how I would love myself! I'd envy no one.

Simone de Beauvoir
It is not mere chance that makes families speak of a child who is 'extraordinary for his age' and also of an old man who is 'extraordinary for his age'; the extraordinariness lies in their behaving like human beings when they are either not yet or no longer men.

Simone de Beauvoir
When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values.

Simone de Beauvoir
It is doubtless impossible to approach any human problems with a mind free from bias.

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 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
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
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
Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, "I don't want to be just another blade of grass."

Simone de Beauvoir
The Sahara was a spectacle as alive as the sea. The tints of the dunes changed according to the time of day and the angle of the light: golden as apricots from far off, when we drove close to them they turned to freshly made butter; behind us they grew pink; from sand to rock, the materials of which the desert was made varied as much as its tints.

Simone de Beauvoir
I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.

Simone de Beauvoir
Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.

Simone de Beauvoir
On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself—on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.

Simone de Beauvoir
Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other.

Simone de Beauvoir
It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency.

Simone de Beauvoir
Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.

Simone de Beauvoir
I was born in Italy on the 17th May 1279 in a castle in the city of Carmona.

Simone de Beauvoir
Except when I am traveling or when extraordinary events are occurring, a day when I do not write tastes of ashes.

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
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
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