Simone de beauvoir quotes

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

Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.

Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.

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.

Men create their own gods and thus have some slight understanding that they are self-fabricated. Women are much more susceptible, because they are completely oppressed by men; they take men at their word and believe in the gods that men have made up. The situation of women, their culture, makes them kneel more often before the gods that have been created by men than men themselves do, who know what they've done. To this extent, women will be more fanatical, whether it is for fascism or for totalitarianism.

Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one being active and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one.

It's only arrogance if you're wrong.

Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive.

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

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

To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other...when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.

I don't want to be just another blade of grass.

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.

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.

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[...].

Each of us is responsible for everything and to every human being.

Most feminists in France came to feminism after '68 as a result of the hypocrisy they experienced in leftist movements. In these movements, where everyone believed there was going to be true equality, fraternity between men and women, and that together they were going to struggle against this rotten society, even there they noticed that the leftists, the militants, kept them "in their place." Women made the coffee while the others did the talking; they were the ones who typed the letters.

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.

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.

Justice can never be done in the midst of injustice.

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

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

To be feminist doesn't mean simply to do nothing, to reduce yourself to total impotence under the pretext of refusing masculine values. There is a problematic, a very difficult dialectic between accepting power and refusing it, accepting certain masculine values, and wanting to transform them. I think it's worth a try.

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

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.

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.

Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.

Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity. The evil all arose from the fact that he had increased his needs rather than limited them; . . . As long as fresh needs continued to be created, so new frustrations would come into being. When had the decline begun? The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution - not a social or political revolution - only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.

To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.

No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.

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

The emancipation of women must be the work of women themselves, independent of the class struggle.

Harmony between two individuals is never granted-it has to be conquered indefinitely.

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

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

All oppression creates a state of war.

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

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

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.

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.

Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.

Society turns away from the aged worker as though he belonged to another species. That is why the whole question is buried in a conspiracy of silence. Old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization.

Let women be provided with living strength of their own. Let them have the means to attack the world and wrest from it their own subsistence, and their dependence will be abolished -- that of man also.

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.

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

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

…but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.

Old age is life's parody.

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.

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

One can hardly tell women that washing up saucepans is their divine mission, [so] they are told that bringing up children is their divine mission. But the way things are in the world, bringing up children has a great deal in common with washing up saucepans.

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.

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

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

Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity.

Why does one exist? That's not my problem. One does exist. The thing to do is to take no notice but go at it on the run and to keep on going right on until you die.

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 should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where i slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat.

I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.

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

Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. But we have seen that it is one of the lies of the serious mind to attempt to give the word "useful" an absolute meaning; nothing is useful if it is not useful to man; nothing is useful to man if the latter is not in a position to define his own ends and values, if he is not free.

The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength -each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence.

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

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

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

At the moment of their emancipation, women have a need to write their own histories.

Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.

To show your true ability is always, in a sense, to surpass the limits of your ability, to go a little beyond them: to dare, to seek, to invent; it is at such a moment that new talents are revealed, discovered, and realized

Old age was growing inside me. It kept catching my eye from the depths of the mirror. I was paralyzed sometimes as I saw it making its way toward me so steadily when nothing inside me was ready for it.

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.

She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust.

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.

...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.

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.

I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.

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

A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong.

The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation.

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

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

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

In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider.

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

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

The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.

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

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

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.

Live with no time-out.

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.

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.

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

Only a woman can write what it is to feel as a woman, to be a woman.

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

As soon as a woman re- fuses to be perfectly happy doing housework eight hours a day, society has a tendency to want to do a lobotomy on her.

The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project

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.

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.

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.

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

all success cloaks a surrender

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

Between women love is contemplative; caresses are intended less to gain possession of the other than gradually to re-create the self through her; separateness is abolished, there is no struggle, no victory, no defeat; in exact reciprocity each is at once subject and object, sovereign and slave; duality become mutuality.

On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself--on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.

One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.

Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.

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

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

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

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.

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

The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength - each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving.

However gifted an individual is at the outset, if his or her talents cannot be developed because of his or her social condition, because of the surrounding circumstances, these talents will be still-born.