Simone de Beauvoir - The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom.

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
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
To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.

Simone de Beauvoir
As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.

Simone de Beauvoir
In the face of an obstacle which it is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.

Simone de Beauvoir
To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.

Simone de Beauvoir
To will freedom and to will to disclose being are one and the same choice; hence, freedom takes a positive and constructive step which causes being to pass to existence in a movement which is constantly surpassed.

Simone de Beauvoir
At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice doesn't pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer.

Simone de Beauvoir
Men of today seem to feel more acutely than ever the paradox of their condition. They know themselves to be the supreme end to which all action should be subordinated, but the exigencies of action force them to treat one another as instruments or obstacles, as means. The more widespread their mastery of the world, the more they find themselves crushed by uncontrollable forces.

Simone de Beauvoir
The time that one gains cannot be accumulated in a storehouse; it is contradictory to want to save up existence, which, the fact is, exists only by being spent and there is a good case for showing that airplanes, machines, the telephone, and the radio do not make men of today happier than those of former times.

Simone de Beauvoir
Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies.

Simone de Beauvoir
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.

Simone de Beauvoir
It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.

Simone de Beauvoir
We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible.

Simone de Beauvoir