Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

I could not help but comment to my distinguished audience that every question asked about Sartre concerned his work, while all those asked about Beauvoir concerned her personal life.

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. The reciprocity of their relations will not do away with the miracles – desire, possession, love, dream, adventure – worked by the division of human beings into two separate categories; and the words that move us – giving, conquering, uniting – will not lose their meaning. On the contrary, 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.

Dans toutes les larmes s'attarde un espoir.

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

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

Das Glück besteht darin, zu leben wie alle Welt und doch wie kein anderer zu sein.

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.

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

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.

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[...].

Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity.

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.

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.

L'idéal de la beauté féminine est variable; mais certaines exigences demeurent constantes; entre autres, puisque la femme est destinée à être possédée, il faut que son corps offre les qualités inertes et passives d'un objet.

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.