Top 350 Simone de Beauvoir Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Jealousy is not contemptible, real love has a beak and claws.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

52. “Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

54. “To show your true ability is always, in a sense, to surpass the limits of your ability, to go a little beyond them: to dare, to seek, to invent; it is at such a moment that new talents are revealed, discovered, and realized.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

55. “From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

56. “What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

57. “I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

58. “She was trying to get rid of a religious hangover.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

59. “People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

61. “I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

63. “Cooking is revolution and creation...”

— Simone de Beauvoir

64. “There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one’s conscience.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

65. “Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

66. “You can’t assume the responsibility for everything you do or don’t do.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

67. “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.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

68. “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.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

70. “Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

73. “Art is an attempt to integrate evil.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

74. “Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

75. “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 the absolute truth.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

76. “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.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

77. “It’s not a very big step from contentment to complacency.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

78. “No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

79. “A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

80. “Faith allows an evasion of those difficulties which the atheist confronts honestly. And to crown all, the believer derives a sense of great superiority from this very cowardice itself.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

82. “A man attaches himself to woman – not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

83. “The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

84. “Live with no time-out.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

85. “When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values, and it is impossible for me to examine this conviction with an objective eye.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

86. “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.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

87. “Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

89. “Old age is life’s parody.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

90. “If it is said men oppress women, the husband reacts indigntantly; he feels oppressed: he is; but in fact, it is the masculine code, the society developed by males and in their interest, that has defined the feminine condition in a form that is now for both sexes a source of distress.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

91. “The fear of death never left me; I couldn’t get used to the thought; I would still sometimes shake and weep with terror. By contrast, the fact of existence here and now sometimes took on a glorious splendour.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

92. “I was too enamored of truth ever to mourn lost illusions.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

95. “He formed his sentences hesitantly and then threw them at me with such force that I felt as if I were receiving a present each time.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

97. “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.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

99. “In truth, to go for a walk with one’s eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial, perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that right now they do most obviously exist.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir