Top 350 Simone de Beauvoir Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies, then the “division” of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

152. “One of the benefits that oppression secures for the oppressor is that the humblest among them feels superior.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

153. “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.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

154. “This has always been a man’s world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

155. “If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through “the eternal feminine,” and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman?”

— Simone de Beauvoir

156. “Christianity gave eroticism its savor of sin and legend when it endowed the human female with a soul.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

157. “Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

158. “In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

159. “I love you, with a touch of tragedy and quite madly.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

160. “Death itself does not frighten me; it is the jump I am afraid of.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

161. “Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

162. “The passionate man seeks possession; he seeks to attain being. The failure and the hell which he creates for himself have been described often enough. He causes certain rare treasures to appear in the world, but he also.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

163. “In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

164. “It is because I reject lies and running away that I am accused of pessimism; but this rejection implies hope – the hope that truth may be of use. And this is a more optimistic attitude than the choice of indifference, ignorance or sham.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

165. “The feminine body is expected to be flesh, but discreetly so;.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

167. “The women of today are in a fair way to dethrone the myth of femininity; they are beginning to affirm their independence in concrete ways; but they do not easily succeed in living completely the life of a human being.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

168. “Old age was growing inside me. It kept catching my eye from the depths of the mirror. I was paralyzed sometimes as I saw it making its way toward me so steadily when nothing inside me was ready for it.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

169. “To reject the notions of the eternal feminine, the black soul, or the Jewish character is not to deny that there are today Jews, blacks, or women: this denial is not a liberation for those concerned but an inauthentic flight.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

170. “Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

171. “If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

172. “Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

173. “This privilege, which he alone possesses, of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects, is what he shares with all his fellow-men. In turn an object for others, he is nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which he depends.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

174. “Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

175. “The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength – each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

176. “It is a difficult matter for man to realize the extreme importance of social discriminations which seem outwardly insignificant but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

177. “The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

178. “Vengeance is pointless, but certain men do not have a place in the world we sought to construct.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

179. “There is no such thing as maternal “instinct”: the word does not in any case apply to the human species. The mother’s attitude is defined by her total situation and by the way she accepts it.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

180. “To will freedom and to will to disclose being are one and the same choice; hence, freedom takes a positive and constructive step which causes being to pass to existence in a movement which is constantly surpassed.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

181. “To make something good of the future, you have to look the present in the face.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

182. “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.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

183. “Let women be provided with living strength of their own. Let them have the means to attack the world and wrest from it their own subsistence, and their dependence will be abolished – that of man also.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

184. “However gifted an individual is at the outset, if his or her talents cannot be developed because of his or her social condition, because of the surrounding circumstances, these talents will be still-born.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

185. “I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen...”

— Simone de Beauvoir

186. “Doomed to procreation and secondary tasks, stripped of her practical importance and her mystical prestige, woman becomes no more than a servant.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

187. “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.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

188. “Woman has ovaries and a uterus; such are the particular conditions that lock her in her subjectivity; some even say she thinks with her hormones. Man vainly forgets that his anatomy also contains hormones and testicles. He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world that he believes he apprehends in all objectivity, whereas he considers woman’s body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that particularizes it.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

189. “Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male’s superiority.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

190. “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.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

191. “Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

192. “Patience is one of those feminine qualities which have their origin in our oppression but should be preserved after our liberation.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

193. “Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside – from others. We do not accept it willingly.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

194. “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, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

195. “Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you’ve lost that, you’ve lost everything.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

196. “The relation of woman to husband, of of daughter to father, of sister to brother, is a relation of vassalage.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

197. “Old age is better for women than for men. First of all, they have less far to fall, since their lives are more mediocre than those of most men.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

198. “The man most sympathetic to women never knows her concrete situation fully. So there is no good reason to believe men when they try to defend privileges whose scope they cannot even fathom.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

199. “I don’t want to be just another blade of grass.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

200. “It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.”

— Simone de Beauvoir