Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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

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

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

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

Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.

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

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

Live with no time-out.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.