Top 350 Simone de Beauvoir Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

Featured in: Change Quotes, Future Quotes

2. “I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

3. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

4. “I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

Featured in: Intelligent Quotes

5. “All oppression creates a state of war.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

6. “Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms. For each of them, love would be the revelation of the self through the gift of the self and the enrichment of the universe.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

8. “No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

9. “The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

11. “To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

12. “Marriage is a career which brings about more benefits than many others.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

Featured in: Inspirational Career Quotes

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

14. “To give space when what one most yearns for is closeness, that is both the great test and great tragedy of love.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

15. “One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

16. “I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth – and truth rewarded me.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

17. “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.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

18. “Woman has always been man’s dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

19. “On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself – on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

21. “If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

22. “The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

24. “In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider...”

— Simone de Beauvoir

25. “One can not start by saying our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends on us to give it importance.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

27. “Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

28. “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.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

30. “To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

31. “I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

33. “Habit has a kind of poetry.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

34. “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.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

35. “If you haven’t been happy very young, you can still be happy later on, but it’s much harder. You need more luck.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

36. “Girls are weighed down by restrictions, boys with demands – two equally harmful disciplines.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

37. “When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

39. “To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

40. “Women’s mutual understanding comes from the fact that they identify themselves with each other; but for the same reason each is against the others.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

41. “What is an adult? A child blown up by age.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

42. “It must be said in addition that the men with the most scrupulous respect for embryonic life are also those who are most zealous when it comes to condemning adults to death in war.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

43. “Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

44. “She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

45. “Each of us is responsible for everything and to every human being.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

46. “It’s only arrogance if you’re wrong.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

47. “Buying is a profound pleasure.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

48. “The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or castle; it stands for permanence and separation from the world.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

49. “A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

Featured in: Country Quotes

50. “A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into?”

— Simone de Beauvoir