Simone De Beauvoir Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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 oppression creates a state of war.

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.

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

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

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[...].

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

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

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

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.

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

Buying is a profound pleasure.

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

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

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

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

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

That is what chills your spine when you read an account of a suicide: not the frail corpse hanging from the window bars but what happened inside that heart immediately before.

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.

It must be said in addition that the men with the most scrupulous respect for embryonic life are also those who are most zealous when it comes to condemning adults to death in war.

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

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

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

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

Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you've lost that, you've lost everything.

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.

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

There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.

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.

It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.

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

To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.

From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.

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

It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.

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.

To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.

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

It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.

To give space when what one most yearns for is closeness, that is both the great test and great tragedy of love.

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.

You have never had any confidence in him. And if he has no confidence in himself it is because he sees himself through your eyes.

There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.

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.

Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.

Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.