Simone de Beauvoir 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.

The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change.

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.

Love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity.

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.

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

Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.

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

Marriage is traditionally the destiny offered to women by society. Most women are married or have been, or plan to be or suffer from not being.

I consider it almost antifeminist to say that there is a feminine nature which expresses itself differently, that a woman speaks her body more than a man, because after all, men also speak their bodies when they write. Everything is implicated in the work of a writer.

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

One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.

Words have to murder reality before they can hold it captive.

it is true that nothing is gained without something being lost: everyone knows that in fulfilling oneself one necessarily sacrifices some possibilities.

Old age is life's parody.

It is a difficult matter for man to realize the extreme importance of social discriminations which seem outwardly insignificant but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature.

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

Marriage is a career which brings about more benefits than many others.

Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately.

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

Habit has a kind of poetry.

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.

There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem.

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.

And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.

If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through "the eternal feminine," and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman?

The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady, yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet.

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

I could see no reason for being sad. It´s just that it makes me unhappy not to feel happy.

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.

Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.

I discovered feminism around 1970-72-precisely the time when feminism began to exist in France. Before that, there was no feminism.

Feminism is a revolutionary movement which is different from the class struggle movement, the proletarian movement, but which is a movement which must be leftist. By that I mean at the extreme left, a movement working to overthrow the whole society.

There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy...It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present.

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.

Picasso never thought of himself as avant-garde. I just find it a bad way to think of yourself.

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.

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.

She was trying to get rid of a religious hangover.

Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.

If the writer is a woman, feminist or not, it will give the language something that it would not have if it had been used by a man.

A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: 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; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.

If you try consciously to be avant-garde, it's a little dangerous, like the present state of modern painting, where dealers try to be avant-garde, and under this pretext, painters take some old scraps and call it avant-garde.

I think there is a great tendency toward autobiography among women today. It is perhaps facile - and I say that even though I have written one myself.

Christian ideology has contributed no little to the oppression of woman.

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.

One can not start by saying that our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends upon us to give it importance.