Simone De Beauvoir Quotes

In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider.

To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity.

all success cloaks a surrender

I'm not against mothers. I am against the ideology which expects every woman to have children, and I'm against the circumstances under which mothers have to have their children.

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

I discovered feminism around 1970-72-precisely the time when feminism began to exist in France. Before that, there was no feminism.

What would Prince Charming have for occupation if he had not to awaken the Sleeping beauty?

This is certainly a very tricky point: How to ally yourself to other leftist forces without losing your feminist specificity.

Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear, without having so much as a smile for the young future.

The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams.

I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.

Jealousy is not contemptible, real love has a beak and claws.

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

Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.

Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me

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

The human species is forever in a state of change, forever becoming.

The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.

Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient.

If I were proud of anything in my life, it would be of our love. I feel we have to tell to each other as many things as we can, so we are not only lovers, but the closest of friends at the same time.

She was trying to get rid of a religious hangover.

A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.

The American woman's inequality with men is proved by her defiant attitude.

Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.

We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible.

Picasso never thought of himself as avant-garde. I just find it a bad way to think of yourself.

And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.

It is doubtless impossible to approach any human problems with a mind free from bias.

It's true that what you find in New York is something other than America. Only small towns and small countries are self-satisfied; a real capital goes beyond its borders.

I think it's wrong to write in a totally esoteric language when you want to talk about things which interest a multitude of women.

We belong to this earth. Now I can see the truth ... I love you on this earth of ours. Love me, do!

Retirement revives the sorrow of parting, the feeling of abandonment, solitude and uselessness that is caused by the loss of some beloved person.

The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.

I don't want to be just another blade of grass.

Marriage is traditionally the destiny offered to women by society. Most women are married or have been, or plan to be or suffer from not being.

One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.

A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.

Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness.

To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.

Ah, if only there were two of me, she thought, one who spoke and the other who listened, one who lived and one who watched, how I would love myself! I would envy no one.

I went to get a detective story. You have to kill time. But time will kill me too - and there´s the true, preestablished balance.

Every time a man dies, a child dies too, and an adolescent and a young man as well; everyone weeps for the one who was dear to him.

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

Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death.

there is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.

Tragedies are all right for a while: you are concerned, you are curious, you feel good. And then it gets repetitive, it doesn't advance, it grows dreadfully boring: it is so very boring, even for me.

Writing is a trade ... which is learned by writing.

Anyway I know only too well that all life is nothing but a brief reprieve from death.

The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.

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