Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

216 Sourced Quotes

The individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of himself.

Simone de Beauvoir
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
Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.

Simone de Beauvoir
I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing.

Simone de Beauvoir
Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. But we have seen that it is one of the lies of the serious mind to attempt to give the word "useful" an absolute meaning; nothing is useful if it is not useful to man; nothing is useful to man if the latter is not in a position to define his own ends and values, if he is not free.

Simone de Beauvoir
Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.

Simone de Beauvoir
That is what chills your spine when you read an account of a suicide: not the frail corpse hanging from the window bars but what happened inside that heart immediately before.

Simone de Beauvoir
Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours...

Simone de Beauvoir
From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simone de Beauvoir