Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

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

Try to stay a man amongst men … There's no other hope for you.

The people of former times [...] they're dead that's the only thing they have over the living but in their own day they were just as sickening. Picturesqueness: I don't fall for that not for one minute. Stinking filthy dirty washing cabbage-stalks what a pretentious fool you have to be to go into such ecstasies over that! And it's the same thing everywhere all the time whether they're stuffing themselves with chips paella or pizza it's the same crew a filthy crew the rich who trample over you the poor who hate you for your money the old who dodder the young who sneer the men who show off the women who open their legs. I'd rather stay at home reading a thriller although they've become so dreary nowadays. The telly too what a clapped-out set of fools! I was made for another planet altogether I mistook the way.

And it’s the same thing everywhere all the time whether they’re stuffing themselves with chips paella or pizza it’s the same crew a filthy crew the rich who trample over you the poor who hate you for your money the old who dodder the young who sneer the men who show off the women who open their legs. I’d rather stay at home reading a thriller although they’ve become so dreary nowadays. The TV too what a clapped-out set of fools! I was made for another planet altogether I mistook the way.

Vengeance is pointless, but certain men do not have a place in the world we sought to construct

To paint, to write, to engage in politics — these are not merely ‘sublimations’; here we have aims that are willed for their own sakes. To deny it is to falsify all human history.

I would have to have a bit of heroism and get out of myself. But I love myself so much!

A life is such a strange object, at one moment translucent, at another utterly opaque, an object I make with my own hands, an object imposed on me, an object for which the world provides the raw material and then steals it from me again, pulverized by events, scattered, broken, scored yet retaining its unity; how heavy it is and how inconsistent: this contradiction breeds many misunderstandings.

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

Ready-made phrases and the ritual of etiquette were unknown to him; his thoughtfulness was pure improvisation, and it resembled the little inventions affection inspires.

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.

Woman has ovaries and a uterus; such are the particular conditions that lock her in her subjectivity; some even say she thinks with her hormones. Man vainly forgets that his anatomy also contains hormones and testicles. He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world that he believes he apprehends in all objectivity, whereas he considers woman's body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that particularizes it.

...faith draws its fanatical power from the fact that it is not knowledge: it is blind, passionate, stubborn, and stupid; what it puts forward is done unconditionally, against reason, against history, against all refutation.

Nul n'est plus arrogant à l'égard des femmes, agressif ou dédaigneux, qu'un homme inquiet de sa virilité.

[From a New York Times biography from May 27, 2010 entitled Introduction to Simone de Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex']

Beauvoir herself was as devout an atheist as she had once been a Catholic, and she dismisses religions — even when they worship a goddess — as the inventions of men to perpetuate their dominion.