Best Beauvoir Quotes & Sayings

Being on the fringes of the world is not the best place for someone who intends to re-create it: here again, to go beyond the given, one must be deeply rooted in it. Personal accomplishments are almost impossible in human categories collectively kept in an inferior situation. — 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

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

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

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

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

A foreign country can best be understood through its literature. — 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

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

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

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

One of the great weaknesses of the progressive, as distinct from the religious, mind, is that it has no awareness of truth as such; only of truth in terms of enlightened expediency. The contrast is well exemplified in two exact contemporaries Simone Weil and Simone de Beauvoir; both highly intelligent and earnestly disposed. In all the fearful moral dilemmas of our time, Simone Weil never once went astray, whereas Simone de Beauvoir, with I am sure the best of intentions, has found herself aligned with apologists for some of the most monstrous barbarities and falsehoods of history. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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