Top 350 Simone de Beauvoir Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “She offered her mouth to him, as if enchanted. A Persian princess, a little Indian, a fox, a morning glory, a lovely wisteria – it always pleased them when you told them they looked like something, like something else.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

202. “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

203. “I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

205. “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

206. “To protest in the name of morality against ‘excesses’ or ‘abuses’ is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no ‘abuses’ or ‘excesses’ here, simpily an all-pervasive system.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

207. “The American woman’s inequality with men is proved by her defiant attitude.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

208. “Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself – exactly oneself and no one else – and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

209. “Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

210. “It’s frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself. It seems unfair. You can’t assume the responsibility for everything you do – or don’t do.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

212. “Between women love is contemplation; caresses are meant less to appropriate the other than to recreate oneself slowly through her; separation is eliminated, there is neither fight nor victory nor defeat; each one is both subject and object.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

213. “Economically, men and women almost form two castes; all things being equal, the former have better jobs, higher wages, and greater chances to succeed than their new female competitors; they occupy many more places in industry, in politics, and so forth, and they hold the most important positions.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

214. “Many things would be changed for Americans if they would only admit that there is ill-luck in this world and that misfortune is not a priori a crime.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

215. “But I miss you to the point of anguish.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

216. “You have never had any confidence in him. And if he has no confidence in himself it is because he sees himself through your eyes.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

217. “The nearer I come to the end of my days, the more I am enabled to see that strange thing, a life, and to see it whole...”

— Simone de Beauvoir

218. “Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one being active and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

219. “Only man can be an enemy for man; only he can rob him of the meaning of his acts and his life because it also belongs only to him alone to confirm it in its existence, to recognize it in actual fact as a freedom.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

221. “The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

222. “The adventure is which I have shared so passionately is not over – this adventure with its doubt, failure, the dreariness of no progress, then a glimpse of light, a hope, a hypothesis confirmed; and then after weeks and months of anxious perseverance, the intoxication of success.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

223. “It was a lovely autumn day with a blue sky: I made my way through a lead-coloured world, and I realized that my mother’s accident was affecting me far more than I had thought it would. I could not really see why. It had wrenched her out of the framework, the role, the set of images in which I had imprisoned her: I recognized her in this patient in bed, but I did not recognize either the pity or the kind of disturbance that she aroused in me.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

224. “There was still a question in her eyes – one that she did not like to put into words.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

225. “I haven’t abandoned you, my little ally, my heart. I kiss you with all my soul.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

226. “The tie that binds her to her oppressors is unlike any other. The division of the sexes is a biological given, not a moment in human history.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

227. “A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: 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; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

228. “A writer is hoisted up onto a pedestal only to scrutinize him more closely and conclude that it was a mistake to put him up there in the first place.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

229. “All around me the world lies like an immense hypothesis that I no longer verify.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

230. “Lynching is an absolute evil; it represents the survival of an obsolete civilization, the perpetuation of a struggle of races which has to disappear;.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

231. “Women- except in certain abstract gatherings such as conferences- do not use “we”; men say “women,” and women adopt this word to refer to themselves; but they do not posit themselves authentically as Subjects .”

— Simone de Beauvoir

232. “It is difficult for men to measure the enormous extent of social discrimination that seems insignificant form the outside and whose moral and intellectual repercussions are so deep in woman that they appear to spring from an original nature. The man most sympathetic to women never knows her concrete situation fully.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

233. “So not every female human being is necessarily a woman; she must take part in this mysterious and endangered reality known as femininity. Is femininity secreted by the ovaries? Is it enshrined in a Platonic heaven?”

— Simone de Beauvoir

234. “Life has made me discover the world as it is, that is, a world of suffering and oppression, of undernourishment for the majority of people, things that I didn’t know when I was young and when I imagined that to discover the world was to discover something beautiful.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

235. “To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it’s hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

236. “When Goya was 80 he drew an ancient man propped on two sticks, with a great mass of white hair and beard all over his face, and the inscription, “I am still learning.””

— Simone de Beauvoir

237. “Primitive people alienate themselves in their mana, their totem; civilized people in their individual souls, their egos, their names, their possessions, and their work: here is the first temptation of inauthenticity.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

238. “As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

239. “The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

240. “It is so tiring to hate someone you love.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

241. “Uno no puede responder con nada a la ausencia.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

242. “I could not help but comment to my distinguished audience that every question asked about Sartre concerned his work, while all those asked about Beauvoir concerned her personal life.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

243. “The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

244. “Dwelling-place and food are useful for life but give it no significance: the immediate goals of the housekeeper are only means, not true ends.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

245. “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

246. “There are cases where the slave does not know his servitude and where it is necessary to bring the seed of his liberation to him from the outside: his submission is not enough to justify the tyranny which is imposed upon him.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

247. “The fact that she accomplishes nothing, that she is nothing, will make her impulses only the more passionate. Empty and unlimited, she seeks from within her nothingness to attain All.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

248. “In order to be an artist, one must be deeply rooted in the society.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

249. “Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours...”

— Simone de Beauvoir

250. “But this element of failure is a very condition of his life; one can never dream of eliminating it without immediately dreaming of death. This does not mean that one should consent to failure, but rather one must consent to struggle against it without respite.”

— Simone de Beauvoir