Quotes from Simone de Beauvoir

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

Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.

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

I could see no reason for being sad. It´s just that it makes me unhappy not to feel happy.

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

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

The nearer I come to the end of my days, the more I am enabled to see that strange thing, a life, and to see it whole.

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

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.

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.

Old age is life's parody.

Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.

In order to be an artist, one must be deeply rooted in the society.

Feminism is one way of attacking society as it now exists.

Buying is a profound pleasure.

The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength - each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving.

Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.

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

The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.

Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.

Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.

One is not born a woman, but becomes one.

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.

Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity.