Simone De Beauvoir Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Simone De Beauvoir
Simone De Beauvoir Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Simone De Beauvoir on Wise Famous Quotes.
If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression.
Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess.
But I was brought up on convent morals and paternal nationalism, I was getting bogged down in contradictions.
Man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it.
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.
One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.
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.
It is easier to put people in chains than to remove them if the chains bring prestige, said George Bernard Shaw.
Every time a man dies, a child dies too, and an adolescent and a young man as well; everyone weeps for the one who was dear to him.
The tie that binds her to her oppressors is unlike any other. The division of the sexes is a biological given, not a moment in human history.
One of the benefits that oppression secures for the oppressor is that the humblest among them feels superior.
A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into?
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
The Communists , following Hegel , speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.
That the child is the supreme aim of woman is a statement having precisely the value of an advertising slogan.
A writer is hoisted up onto a pedestal only to scrutinize him more closely and conclude that it was a mistake to put him up there in the first place.
He would talk and talk and talk; the twilight would fill with cigarette smoke and shimmering words would tremble in the blue coils of air...
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.
: woman is an eminently poetic reality since man projects onto her everything he is not resolved to be.
Many things would be changed for Americans if they would only admit that there is ill-luck in this world and that misfortune is not a priori a crime.
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.
By the time humankind reaches the stage of writing its mythology and laws, patriarchy is definitively established: it is males who write the codes.
One understands now the drama that rends the adolescent girl at puberty: she cannot become "a grown-up" without accepting her femininity
That a whole part of the middle class detests me ... is utterly normal. I would be troubled if the contrary were true.
I was too much of an extremist to be able to live under the eye of God and at the same time say both yes and no to life
The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.
Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours ...
To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.
Charity is all very nice,but people want to get something out of it.That's the principle of charity affairs.
It must feel wonderfully strange when, like Manette, one stands there, the only witness to a vanished world.
One can not start by saying our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends on us to give it importance.
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
Doomed to procreation and secondary tasks, stripped of her practical importance and her mystical prestige, woman becomes no more than a servant.
Yet a revolution cannot begin until the diffuse, private indignation of individuals coalesces into a common cause. Beauvoir not only marshaled
Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word. Machines won't change human nature.
Taking without being taken in the anguish of becoming prey is the dangerous game of adolescent feminine sexuality.
The Social Security's medical consultants support the interest not of the victims but of the organization.
Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
I could easily understand why Lambert was bored with this peace which gave us back our lives without giving us back our reasons for living.
I've done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I've been swindled all the same because it's never anything more.
We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible.
Literature took the place in my life that had once been occupied by religion: it absorbed me entirely, and transfigured my life.
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.