Top 350 Simone de Beauvoir Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

103. “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.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

104. “It is easier to put people in chains than to remove them if the chains bring prestige, said George Bernard Shaw.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

105. “Love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

106. “I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

107. “Society turns away from the aged worker as though he belonged to another species. That is why the whole question is buried in a conspiracy of silence. Old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

108. “Why does one exist? That’s not my problem. One does exist. The thing to do is to take no notice but go at it on the run and to keep on going right on until you die.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

109. “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

110. “Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

111. “Men’s economic privilege, their social value, the prestige of marriage, the usefulness of masculine support – all these encourage women to ardently want to please men. They are on the whole still in a state of serfdom. It follows that woman knows and chooses herself not as she exists for herself but as man defines her. She thus has to be described first as men dream of her since her being-for-men is one of the essential factors of her concrete condition.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

112. “It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

113. “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.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

114. “In a way, literature is true than life,′ he said to himself. ‘On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that’s why it’s false. But it’s damned satisfying. In life, you’re constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

115. “Have you ever felt in your inmost being, the conscience of others?′ again she was trembling, the words were not releasing her. ‘It’s intolerable you know.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

116. “That is what chills your spine when you read an account of a suicide: not the frail corpse hanging from the window bars but what happened inside that heart immediately before.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

117. “There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

119. “Everything that men have written about women should be viewed with suspicion, because they are both judge and party,’ wrote Poulain de la Barre,11 a little-known seventeenth-century feminist.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

120. “The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady, yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

121. “Justice can never be done in the midst of injustice.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

122. “It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

123. “The facts of religion were convincing only to those who were already convinced.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

124. “She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

125. “The monologue is her form of revenge. FLAUBERT.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

126. “Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

127. “It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

129. “It’s easy to pay with the blood of others.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

130. “Sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

131. “Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word. Machines won’t change human nature.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

132. “Christian ideology has contributed no little to the oppression of woman.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

133. “Harmony between two individuals is never granted-it has to be conquered indefinitely.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

134. “When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

135. “The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman’s concrete situation.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

136. “I feel something troubling inside of me which scares me, an exhausting violence. But I accept the great adventure of being me.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

137. “Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

138. “To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

139. “Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

140. “Be loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

141. “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: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

142. “The prostitute is the sum of all types of feminine slavery at once.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

143. “Simonides of Amorgos says, “Women are the greatest evil God ever created: if they sometimes seem useful, they soon change into trouble for their masters.” For Hipponax: “There are but two days in life when your wife brings you joy: her wedding day and her funeral.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

144. “I’ve done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I’ve been swindled all the same because it’s never anything more.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

145. “To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

147. “Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

148. “We always come back to the same vicious circle – an extreme degree of material or intellectual poverty does away with the means of alleviating it.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

149. “I’m not tragic these days, I don’t weep, but I feel alone, bewildered, far from you, far from everything – nothing has any meaning.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

150. “Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing – and a neater one than silence.”

— Simone de Beauvoir