Simone De Beauvoir Quotes

"Art is an attempt to integrate evil."

"Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring."

"Human humanity is not a state but a becoming."

"I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finitude."

"I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely."

"If you live long enough, you see that every victory turns into a defeat."

"It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting."

"It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny."

"I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth; and truth rewarded me."

"I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way."

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

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

"My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets."

"No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility."

"One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible."

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

"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion."

"Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth."

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

"Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable."

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

"The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project."

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

"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."

"The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels."

"To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude."

"To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her."

"To lose confidence in one's body is to lose confidence in oneself."

"To will oneself free is also to will others free."

"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."

"Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen."

"Without failure, no ethics; for a being who, from the very start, would be an exact co-incidence with himself, in a perfect plenitude, the notion of having-to-be would have no meaning."