Quotes from Simone de Beauvoir

Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies.

Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.

Les livres que j'aimais devinrent une Bible où je puisais des conseils et des secours.

My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy.

In oppressing, one becomes oppressed. Men are enchained by reason of their very sovereignty; it is because they alone earn money that their wives demand checks, it is because they alone engage in a business or profession that their wives require them to be successful, it is because they alone embody transcendence that their wives wish to rob them of it by taking charge...

I quickly realized that friendships without tomorrows, and the little anguishes of parting, were part of the pleasures of traveling. I resolutely avoided bores, saw only those who amused me. We spent afternoons taking long walks, nights drinking and talking, and then we would leave each other, never to meet again, and there were no regrets. How simple life was. No regrets, no obligations, my acts and gestures counted for nothing, no one asked my advice, and I knew no other rule but my whims.

Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence.

There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.

At night I would climb the steps to the Sacre-Coeur, and I would watch Paris, that futile oasis, scintillating in the wilderness of space. I would weep, because it was so beautiful, and because it was so useless.

He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!

When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.

Misogynists have often reproached intellectual women for 'letting themselves go'; but they also preach to them: if you want to be our equals, stop wearing makeup and polishing your nails. This advice is absurd. Precisely because the idea of femininity is artificially defined by customs and fashion, it is imposed on every woman from the outside[...]. The individual is not free to shape the idea of femininity at will.

The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy...It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present.

One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.

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.

woman is an eminently poetic reality since man projects onto her everything he is not resolved to be.

A woman alone always seems a little unusual; it is not true that men respect women: they respect each other through their women—wives, mistresses, "kept" women; when masculine protection no longer extends over her, woman is disarmed before a superior caste that is aggressive, sneering, or hostile. As an "erotic perversion

Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consultation for death.

The adventure is which I have shared so passionately is not over--this adventure with its doubt, failure, the dreariness of no progress, then a glimpse of light, a hope, a hypothesis confirmed; and then after weeks and months of anxious perseverance, the intoxication of success.

The truth is, however, that when two individuals detest each other, while being unable to get along without each other, it is not of all human relations the truest and most moving, but rather the most pitiable.

Death itself does not frighten me; it is the jump I am afraid of.

Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, I don't want to be just another blade of grass.

Literature took the place in my life that had once been occupied by religion: it absorbed me entirely, and transfigured my life.

modern woman is everywhere permitted to regard her body as capital for exploitation.