Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.

It is difficult for men to measure the enormous extent of social discrimination that seems insignificant form the outside and whose moral and intellectual repercussions are so deep in woman that they appear to spring from an original nature. The man most sympathetic to women never knows her concrete situation fully.

When we are young we believe to be adults; when we are adults we believe to be young.

The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.

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.

Je suis trop intelligente, trop exigeante et trop riche pour que personne puisse se charger de moi entièrement. Personne ne me connaît ni ne m'aime tout entière. Je n'ai que moi.
Il ne faut pas que j'essaie de tromper cette solitude en renonçant à ce que je peux seule porter. Il faut que je vive, sachant que personne ne m'aidera à vivre. Ma force, c'est que je m'estime aussi haut que n'importe quel autrui ; je peux bien envier à l'un ou l'autre telle qualité ; de personne la valeur ne me semble dépasser la mienne : je possède autant. Seule je vivrai, forte de ce que je sais être.

"Forced motherhood results in bringing miserable children into the world, children whose parents cannot feed them, who become victims of public assistance or "martyr children." It must be pointed out that the same society so determined to defend the rights of the fetus shows no interest in children after they are born; instead of trying to reform this scandalous institution called public assistance, society prosecutes abortionists; those responsible for delivering orphans to torturers are left free; society closes its eyes to the horrible tyranny practiced in "reform schools" or in the private homes of child abusers; and while it refuses to accept that the fetus belongs to the mother carrying it, it nevertheless agrees that the child is his parents' thing."

it is not women's inferiority that has determined their historical insignificance: it is their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority

They don't like being seen through: as for me I'm straight I don't join their act I tear masks off.

Cooking is revelation and creation; and a woman can find special satisfaction in a successful cake or a flaky pastry, for not every one can do it: one must have the gift.

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

Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it. Psychiatrists have told me that they give The Second Sex to their women patients to read, and not merely to intellectual women but to lower-middle-class women, to office workers and women working in factories. 'Your book was a great help to me. Your book saved me,' are the words I have read in letters from women of all ages and all walks of life. If my book has helped women, it is because it expressed them, and they in their turn gave it its truth. Thanks to them, it is no longer a matter for scandal and concern. During these last ten years the myths that men created have crumbled, and many women writers have gone beyond me and have been far more daring than I. Too many of them for my taste take sexuality as their only theme; but at least when they write about it they now present themselves as the eye-that-looks, as subject, consciousness, freedom.

My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together.

That's what I consider true generosity. You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.

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.