Top 357 Quotes & Sayings by Simone de Beauvoir

In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.

Sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.

All oppression creates a state of war.

One is not born a woman, but becomes one.

When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.

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.

The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.

This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.

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

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.

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.

Art is an attempt to integrate evil.

If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.

Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.

The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them.

Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.

In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.

Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.

To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.

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

One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.

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.

Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.

Buying is a profound pleasure.

Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen.

No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.

Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.

Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.

What is an adult? A child blown up by age.

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.

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

Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.

I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.

The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project

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.

A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself.

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

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.

Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms. For each of them, love would be the revelation of the self through the gift of the self and the enrichment of the universe.

Be loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.

As long as the family and the myth of the family ... have not been destroyed, women will still be oppressed.

When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.

That's what I consider true generosity. You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.

No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.

What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.

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.

The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength -each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence.

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[...].

I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself

Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity. The evil all arose from the fact that he had increased his needs rather than limited them; . . . As long as fresh needs continued to be created, so new frustrations would come into being. When had the decline begun? The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution - not a social or political revolution - only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.

You have to start from where you are today and from what can be done.

To show your true ability is always, in a sense, to surpass the limits of your ability, to go a little beyond them: to dare, to seek, to invent; it is at such a moment that new talents are revealed, discovered, and realized

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.

The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.

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

Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.