Beauvoir Quotes & Sayings

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. — Simone De Beauvoir

If I had rediscovered in Heaven, amplified to infinity, the monstrous alliance of fragility and implacability, of caprice and artificial necessity which had oppressed me since my birth, rather than worship Him I would have chosen damnation. — Simone De Beauvoir

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

Literature isn't necessarily pleasant,' he said.

'But it is!' Lambert said. 'Even things that are sad become pleasant when they are done artistically.' He hesitated. 'Maybe pleasant isn't exactly the right word, but it'll do. — Simone De Beauvoir

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. — Simone De Beauvoir

The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another; it is never the given that confers superiorities: 'virtue', as the ancients called it, is defined on the level of 'that which depends on us'. — Simone De Beauvoir

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

Let women be provided with living strength of their own. — Simone De Beauvoir

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. — Simone De Beauvoir

Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness. — Simone De Beauvoir

When Simone de Beauvoir said, "One is not born a woman - one becomes one," she didn't know the half of it. In — Caitlin Moran

The relation of woman to husband, of daughter to father, of sister to brother, is a relation of vassalage. — Simone De Beauvoir

She is the woman that contradicts Simone de Beauvoir's saying "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." She is the woman that makes your tooth pain seem like a trivial matter in comparison to the heartaches she causes as she deliberately passes by your side. She is the woman that makes your throat feel swollen and your tie to suddenly seem too tight. She is the woman that is able to take you to the seven heavens with a whisper; straight to cloud number nine.. She is the woman that erases all other women unintentionally and becomes without demanding the despot of your heart. She is the woman that sends you back and forth to purgatory and resurrects you with each unintended touch. She is the woman that will ask of you to burn Rome just to collect for her a handful of dust. — Malak El Halabi

By the time humankind reaches the stage of writing its mythology and laws, patriarchy is definitively established: it is males who write the codes. — Simone De Beauvoir

I love you, with a touch of tragedy and quite madly. — Simone De Beauvoir

No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself. — Simone De Beauvoir

Masculine desire is as much an offence as it is a compliment; in so far as she feels herself responsible for her charm, or feels she is exerting it of her own accord, she is much pleased with her conquests, but to the extent that her face, her figure, her flesh are facts she must bear with, she wants to hide them from this independent stranger who lusts after them. — Simone De Beauvoir

Trudging alone along that black road, sometimes in the teeth of wind and rain, and watching the white distant gleam of convolvulus through the park railings, gave me an exhilarating sensation of adventure. — Simone De Beauvoir

History took hold of me and never let me go thereafter. — Simone De Beauvoir

He formed his sentences hesitantly and then threw them at me with such force that I felt as if I were receiving a present each time — Simone De Beauvoir

History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born. — Simone De Beauvoir

Existentialist literature provides a more satisfactory account of the persistence of feminine narcissism. Simone de Beauvoir makes use of the existentialist conception of 'situation' in order to account for the persistence of narcissism in the feminine personality. A woman's situation, i.e., those meanings derived from the total context in which she comes to maturity, disposes her to apprehend her body not as the instrument of her transcendence, but as 'an object destined for another.'

Knowing that she is to be subjected to the cold appraisal of the male connoisseur and that her life prospects may depend on how she is seen, a woman learns to appraise herself first. The sexual objectification of women produces a duality in feminine consciousness. The gaze of the Other is internalized so that I myself become at once seer and seen, appraiser and the thing appraised. — Sandra Lee Bartky

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. — Simone De Beauvoir

depopulates it. Nothing exists outside of his stubborn project; therefore nothing can induce him to modify his choices. And having involved his whole life with an external object which can continually escape him, he tragically feels his dependence. Even if it does not definitely disappear, the object never gives itself. The passionate man makes himself a lack of being not that there might be being, but in order to be. And he remains at a distance; he is never fulfilled. — Simone De Beauvoir

For the first time I saw her as a dead body under suspended sentence. — Simone De Beauvoir

Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart. — Simone De Beauvoir

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. — Simone De Beauvoir

[T]raveling, a local is shocked to realize that in neighboring countries locals view him as a foreigner; between villages, clans, nations, and classes there are wars, potlatches, agreements, treaties, and struggles that remove the absolute meaning from the idea of the 'other' and bring out its relativity; whether one likes it or not, individuals and groups have no choice but to recognize the reciprocity of their relation. How is it, then, that between the sexes this reciprocity has not been put forward, that one of the terms has been asserted as the only essential one, denying any relativity in regard to its correlative, defining the latter as pure alterity? Why do women not contest male sovereignty? — Simone De Beauvoir

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

Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man. — Simone De Beauvoir

They [Americans] want to believe that Good and Evil can be defined in precise categories, that Good is already, or will be easily achieved ... if this optimism appears too superficial, they will try to create a kind of anti-God: the U.S.S.R. That is Evil, and it only needs to be annihilated to re-establish the reign of Good. — Simone De Beauvoir

In Beauvoir's experience Darwin was way wrong. The fittest didn't survive, they were killed by the idiocy of their neighbors, who continued to bumble along oblivious. — Louise Penny

She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life. — Simone De Beauvoir

Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity. — Simone De Beauvoir

Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess. — Simone De Beauvoir

Primitive people alienate themselves in their mana, their totem; civilized people in their individual souls, their egos, their names, their possessions, and their work: here is the first temptation of inauthenticity. — Simone De Beauvoir

It is not a matter of approaching a fixed limit: absolute Knowledge or the happiness of man or the perfection of beauty; all human effort would then be doomed to failure, for with each step forward the horizon recedes a step; for man it is a matter of pursuing the expansion of his existence and of retrieving this very effort as an absolute. Science — Simone De Beauvoir

Beauvoir lent Maheu a recent English novel she had enjoyed, The Green Hat, by Michael Arlen. She admired its independent heroine, Iris Storm. Maheu did not. 'I have no liking for women of easy virtue,' he told her. 'Much as I like a woman to please me, I find it impossible to respect any woman I've had.' Beauvoir was indignant. 'One does not HAVE an Iris Storm! — Hazel Rowley

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

The terms masculine and feminine are
used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal
papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite
like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the
positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of
man to designate human beings in general ; whereas woman
represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without
reciprocity. — Simone De Beauvoir

An enormous round egg snatching and castrating the agile sperm;
monstorous and stuffed, the queen termite reigning over the servile
males; the praying mantis and the spider, gorged on love, crushing
their partners and gobbling them up; the dog in heat running through
back alleys, leaving perverse smells in her wake; the monkey showing
herself off brazenly, sneaking away with flirtatious hypocrisy. And
the most splendid wildcats, the tigress, lioness, and panther, lie
down slavishly under the male's imperial embrace, inert, impatient,
shrewd, stupid, insensitive, lewd, fierce, and humiliated — Simone De Beauvoir

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. — Simone De Beauvoir

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. — Simone De Beauvoir

But this element of failure is a very condition of his life; one can never dream of eliminating it without immediately dreaming of death. This does not mean that one should consent to failure, but rather one must consent to struggle against it without respite. — Simone De Beauvoir

Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself - exactly oneself and no one else - and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else. — Simone De Beauvoir

Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside
from others. We do not accept it willingly. — Simone De Beauvoir

One of the problems he will seek to solve is how to make his wife both a servant and a companion; his attitude will evolve throughout the centuries, and this will also entail an evolution in woman's destiny.11 — Simone De Beauvoir

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. — Simone De Beauvoir

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

One of the benefits that oppression secures for the oppressor is that the humblest among them feels superior. — Simone De Beauvoir

Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence. — Simone De Beauvoir

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. — Simone De Beauvoir

She asked us to raise the curtain that was covering the window and she looked at the golden leaves of the trees. 'How lovely. I shouldn't see that from my flat!' She smiled. And both of us, my sister and I, had the same thought: it was that same smile that had dazzled us when we were little children, the radiant smile of a young woman. Where had it been between then and now? — Simone De Beauvoir

That the child is the supreme aim of woman is a statement having precisely the value of an advertising slogan. — Simone De Beauvoir

Have you ever felt in your inmost being, the conscience of others?' again she was trembling, the words were not releasing her. 'It's intolerable you know — Simone De Beauvoir

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. — Simone De Beauvoir

The thing I understood least of all was that knowledge led to despair and damnation. Our spiritual mentor had not said that those bad books had given a false picture of life: if that had been the case, he could easily have exposed their falsehood; the tragedy of the little girl whom he had failed to bring to salvation was that she had made a premature discovery of the true nature of reality. Well, anyhow, I thought, I shall discover it myself one day, and it isn't going to kill me: the idea that there was a certain age when knowledge of the truth could prove fatal I found offensive to common sense. — Simone De Beauvoir

When I was 17, I was at La Coupole brasserie, and Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir asked me to join them at their table. They were fascinated that I'd watched their programme on existentialism back home and wanted to understand nothingness and being. — Jerry Hall

Of course Sartre and Beauvoir were not alone in being seduced by Communism. Many of the Auden generation, on both sides of the Channel, had become infatuated with the socialist 'paradise', and remained blind to its atrocities. — Carole Seymour-Jones

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

Man may reproach women for their dissimulation, but his complacency must be great indeed for him to be so constantly duped. — Simone De Beauvoir

Harmony between two individuals is never granted-it has to be conquered indefinitely. — Simone De Beauvoir

I hadn't known Chancel very well, but ten days earlier I had seen him laughing with the others around the Christmas tree. Maybe Robert was right; the distance between the living and the dead really isn't very great. And yet, like myself, those future corpses who were drinking their coffee in silence appeared ashamed to be so alive. — Simone De Beauvoir

I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe. — Simone De Beauvoir

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. — Simone De Beauvoir

To identify Woman with Altruism is to guarantee man absolute rights to her devotion; it is to impose on women a categorical must-be. — Simone De Beauvoir

Economically, men and women almost form two castes; all things being equal, the former have better jobs, higher wages, and greater chances to succeed than their new female competitors; they occupy many more places in industry, in politics, and so forth, and they hold the most important positions. — Simone De Beauvoir

It's only arrogance if you're wrong. — Simone De Beauvoir

Woman is not a fixed reality but a becoming; she has to be compared with man in her becoming; that is, her possibilities have to be defined: what skews the issues so much is that she is being reduced to what she was, to what she is today, while the question concerns her capacities; the fact is that her capacities manifest themselves clearly only when they have been realized: but the fact is also that when one considers a being who is transcendence and surpassing, it is never possible to close the books. — Simone De Beauvoir

He would talk and talk and talk; the twilight would fill with cigarette smoke and shimmering words would tremble in the blue coils of air... — Simone De Beauvoir

A woman alone always seems a little unusual; it is not true that men respect women: they respect each other through their women - wives, mistresses, "kept" women; when masculine protection no longer extends over her, woman is disarmed before a superior caste that is aggressive, sneering, or hostile. As an "erotic perversion, — Simone De Beauvoir

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. — Simone De Beauvoir

What would Prince Charming have for occupation if he had not to awaken the Sleeping beauty? — Simone De Beauvoir

Her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly. — Simone De Beauvoir

Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. — Simone De Beauvoir

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. — Simone De Beauvoir

The little girl's sense of secrecy that developed at prepuberty only grows in importance. She closes herself up in fierce solitude: she refuses to reveal to those around her the hidden self that she considers to be her real self and that is in fact an imaginary character: she plays at being a dancer like Tolstoy's Natasha, or a saint like Marie Leneru, or simply the singular wonder that is herself. There is still an enormous difference between this heroine and the objective face that her parents and friends recognise in her. She is also convinced that she is misunderstood: her relationship with herself becomes even more passionate: she becomes intoxicated with her isolation, feels different, superior, exceptional: she promises that the future will take revenge on the mediocrity of her present life. From this narrow and petty existence she escapes by dreams. — Simone De Beauvoir

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. — Simone De Beauvoir

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

The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it. — Simone De Beauvoir

But what does the word insist mean after a whole life of love and understanding? I have never asked anything for myself that I did not also wish for him. — Simone De Beauvoir

Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap. — Simone De Beauvoir

For a woman to be taken as seriously as a man she must be three times as effective. Happily, this is not difficult.
Simone de Beauvoir — Gale Martin

We always come back to the same vicious circle - an extreme degree of material or intellectual poverty does away with the means of alleviating it. — Simone De Beauvoir

It is easier to put people in chains than to remove them if the chains bring prestige, said George Bernard Shaw. — Simone De Beauvoir

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. — Simone De Beauvoir

I didn't know the first thing about the people around me, but that didn't matter: I was in a new world; and I had the feelings that at last I had put my finger on the secret of freedom. — Simone De Beauvoir

He loved Clara. I miss a lot in life," said Gilbert. "But I have a nose for love." "Like a truffle pig," said Beauvoir, then regretted it when he saw the asshole saint's reaction. Then, unexpectedly, Gilbert smiled. "Exactly. I can smell it. Love has an aroma all its own, you know." Beauvoir looked at Gilbert, amazed by what he'd just heard. Maybe, he thought, this man was - "Smells like compost," said Gilbert. - an asshole after all. — Louise Penny

Beauvoir left their home wanting to call his wife and tell her how much he loved her, and then tell her what he believed in, and his fears and hopes and disappointments. To talk about something real and meaningful. He dialed his cell phone and got her. But the words got caught somewhere south of his throat. Instead he told her the weather had cleared, and she told him about the movie she'd rented. Then they both hung up. — Louise Penny

Only man can be an enemy for man; only he can rob him of the meaning of his acts and his life because it also belongs only to him alone to confirm it in its existence, to recognize it in actual fact as a freedom — Simone De Beauvoir

At night I would climb the steps to the Sacre-Coeur, and I would watch Paris, that futile oasis, scintillating in the wilderness of space. I would weep, because it was so beautiful, and because it was so useless. — Simone De Beauvoir

Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me — Simone De Beauvoir

Today it strikes me that the most important aspect of these conversations was not so much what we said as what we took for granted, and what in fact was not so at all. We were wrong about almost everything. An accurate character sketch must take these errors into account, since they expressed one kind of reality - our actual situation. — Simone De Beauvoir

Which we welcomed precisely because it happened to suit our convenience. — Simone De Beauvoir

Counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen. — Simone De Beauvoir

[Woman] is simply what man decrees; thus she is called "the sex," by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex
absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute
she is the Other. — Simone De Beauvoir

If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it a discussion — Simone De Beauvoir

Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom. — Simone De Beauvoir

There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time.
But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself. — Simone De Beauvoir

No one saves an e-mail, because it's so inherently impersonal. I worry about posterity in general. All the great love letters - from Simone de Beauvoir to Sartre, from Samuel Clemens to his wife, Olivia - I don't know, I always think about what will be lost - — Gillian Flynn