Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.

I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.

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.

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

If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it "a discussion

The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams.

I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.

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

Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other.

It's only arrogance if you're wrong.

If you haven't been happy very young, you can still be happy later on, but it's much harder. You need more luck.

The nearer I come to the end of my days, the more I am enabled to see that strange thing, a life, and to see it whole.

I willingly trust myself to chance. I let my thoughts wander, I digress, not only sitting at my work, but all day long, all night even. It often happens that a sentence suddenly runs through my head before I go to bed, or when I am unable to sleep, and I get up again and write it down.

Writing ... is a profession that can only be learned by writing.

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.

In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider.

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

At bottom, antipsychiatry is still psychiatry. And it doesn't really address itself to women's problems.

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.

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.

The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.

What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class.

Given masculine norms, it is clear that women are more likely to be considered crazy - I'm not saying to be crazy.

Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, "I don't want to be just another blade of grass."

A man of the right doesn't write in the same way as a man of the left, you can see that right away, or a woman of the right or a woman of the left.

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.

Buying is a profound pleasure.

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.

You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde.

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

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.

There are topics which are common to men and women. I think that if a woman speaks of oppression, of misery, she will speak of it in exactly the same way as a man. But if she speaks of her own personal problems as a woman, she will obviously speak in another way.

Old age is better for women than for men. First of all, they have less far to fall, since their lives are more mediocre than those of most men.

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[...].

When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.

There was a time, in the nineteenth century, for example, when women spoke mostly about the house, children, birth, and so forth, because it was their domain. That's changing a little, now.

Justice can never be done in the midst of injustice.

Women's mutual understanding comes from the fact that they identify themselves with each other; but for the same reason each is against the others.

Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.

There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.

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

I think that feminism permits women to speak among themselves, instead of simply being resentful, having personal complaints, which get them nowhere and which make them sick and ill-tempered, depressive and poison the lives of their husbands and children. It's much better to arrive at a collective consciousness of this problem, which is both a kind of therapy and the basis for a struggle.

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.

Jealousy is not contemptible, real love has a beak and claws.

In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.

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

Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.

Art is an attempt to integrate evil.