Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

Two forces create eternity – a good and an evil force.

An intellectual operation is dangerous, often painful, sometimes thankless.

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.

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power.

All oppression creates a state of war.

Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.

Person seldom argue when their own idea seems wrong to them.

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

One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.

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

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 hate weddings. Old people poking me saying you’re next.

You are not born a woman, but become one.

If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.

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.

One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others.

Representation is the power to affect bodies and minds, and it has a direct effect on bodies and minds.

What is a woman, Simone asks, but a lack, a void, an absence of man?

The word ‘woman’ strikes me as absurd, as if one were to talk of a ‘pairof-shears’.

This sex thing is a hungry deity.

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

Aging 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.

Humanity is male, and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being.

Man enjoys the great advantage of having a god endorse the code he writes.

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.

If the feminine issue is so absurd, this is because a woman is a topic exhausted of content, as we say in logic.

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

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.,

Why one man rather than the other? 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.

It so happens that we feel all the boundaries more keenly when we cross them.

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.

I was in the rue de Rennes. I had just recognized a newspaper kiosk. According to him, I live in a neurotic age.

The advance of women is even more difficult than that of socialism, but it is necessary for there to be a movement for the liberation of women.

This sex thing is a great joke.

Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all.

We must act out what we have conceived and produced. Life must be the product of our actions, of our creations.”

In itself femininity is a broad term which embraces all the individuals, irrespective of their biological sex, who recognize themselves in it.

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.

Words are battles, and my words are sharper than swords.

I have never believed that one should denigrate men in order to elevate women.

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

She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.

Why had I not died in my youth – in my spring-like youth when the plenitude of life filled every instant, when every instant was precious to me? Why had I been granted a respite and for what purpose? But at every instant old age was gliding over and obliterating the image of my youth, my beauty; the narcissistic satisfaction of life which had been granted to me I had wasted in a truly extravagant life.

All exported revolution strengthens the oppression it claims to destroy.