Top 350 Simone de Beauvoir Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “I had to call the past to life, and illuminate every corner of the five continents, descend to the centre of the earth and make the circuit of the moon and stars.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

253. “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

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

— Simone de Beauvoir

255. “Existence asserts itself as an absolute which must seek its justification within itself and not suppress itself. To attain this truth, man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

256. “The world brings itself into being before my eyes in an everlasting present: I grow used to its different aspects so quickly that it does not seem to me to change.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

257. “But what does the word insist mean after a whole life of love and understanding? I have never asked anything for myself that I did not also wish for him.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

258. “For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

259. “To identify Woman with Altruism is to guarantee man absolute rights to her devotion; it is to impose on women a categorical must-be.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

260. “It is dreadful to think that behind me my own past is no longer anything but shifting darkness.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

261. “They don’t like being seen through: as for me I’m straight I don’t join their act I tear masks off.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

262. “Alone: for the first time I understood the terrible significance of that word. Alone without a witness, without anyone to speak to, without refuge. The breath in my body, the blood in my veins, all this hurly-burly in my head existed for nobody.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

263. “I quickly realized that friendships without tomorrows, and the little anguishes of parting, were part of the pleasures of traveling. I resolutely avoided bores, saw only those who amused me. We spent afternoons taking long walks, nights drinking and talking, and then we would leave each other, never to meet again, and there were no regrets. How simple life was. No regrets, no obligations, my acts and gestures counted for nothing, no one asked my advice, and I knew no other rule but my whims.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

264. “For the first time I saw her as a dead body under suspended sentence.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

265. “The means, it is said, will be justified by the end; but it is the means which define it, and if it is contradicted at the moment that it is set up, the whole enterprise sinks into absurdity.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

266. “History took hold of me and never let me go thereafter.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

267. “The present is a transitory existence which is made in order to be abolished: it retrieves itself only by transcending itself toward the permanence of future being; it is only as an instrument, as a means, it is only by it’s efficacy with regard to the coming of the future that the present is validly realized: reduced to itself it is nothing, one may dispose of it as he pleases.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

268. “To be moral is to discover fundamentally ones own being.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

269. “How will the fact of being women have affected our lives? What precise opportunities have been given us, and which ones have been denied? What destiny awaits our younger sisters, and in which direction should we point them?”

— Simone de Beauvoir

270. “Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, “I don’t want to be just another blade of grass.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

271. “Always the same faces, the same surroundings, the same conversations, the same problems. The more it changes, the more it repeats itself. In the end, you feel as if you’re dying alive.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

272. “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.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

273. “Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

274. “He reflected. ‘I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!”

— Simone de Beauvoir

275. “All the idols made by man, however terrifying they may be, are in point of fact subordinate to him, and that is why he will always have it in his power to destroy them.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

276. “If I were the earth it would disgust me, all this vermin on my back, I’d shake it off.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

277. “Ready-made phrases and the ritual of etiquette were unknown to him; his thoughtfulness was pure improvisation, and it resembled the little inventions affection inspires.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

278. “Anyway I know only too well that all life is nothing but a brief reprieve from death.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

279. “As far as I am concerned sexuality no longer exists. I used to call this indifference serenity: all at once I have come to see it in another light – it is a mutilation; it is the loss of a sense. The lack of it makes me blind to the needs, the pains, and the joys of those who do possess it.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

280. “I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

281. “I was no longer a vacant mind, an abstracted gaze, but the turbulent fragrance of the waving grain, the intimate smell of the heather moors, the dense heat of noon or the shiver of twilight; I was heavy; yet I was as vapour in the blue airs of summer and knew no bounds.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

282. “One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

283. “Today I believe that, under the specially privileged conditions in which I exist, life contains two main truths which we must face simultaneously, and between which there is no choice – the joy of being, the horror of being no more.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

284. “It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

285. “One understands now the drama that rends the adolescent girl at puberty: she cannot become “a grown-up” without accepting her femininity.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

286. “But it is impossible for anyone to say ‘I am sacrificing myself’ without feeling bitterness.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

287. “To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

288. “Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it’s exigencies.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

289. “The innumerable conflicts that set men and women against one another come from the fact that neither is prepared to assume all the consequences of this situation which the one has offered and the other accepted.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

290. “Tragedies are all right for a while: you are concerned, you are curious, you feel good. And then it gets repetitive, it doesn’t advance, it grows dreadfully boring: it is so very boring, even for me.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

291. “A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

292. “She compensated for this sense of inferiority by making fun of everything. I did not notice it then, but she never made fun of my faults, only of my virtues;.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

293. “It is not a matter of approaching a fixed limit: absolute Knowledge or the happiness of man or the perfection of beauty; all human effort would then be doomed to failure, for with each step forward the horizon recedes a step; for man it is a matter of pursuing the expansion of his existence and of retrieving this very effort as an absolute. Science.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

294. “High as it may be, the number of victims is always measurable; and each one taken one by one is never anything but an individual: yet, through time and space, the triumph of the cause embraces the infinite, it interests the whole collectivity. In order to deny the outrage it is enough to deny the importance of the individual, even though it be at the cost of this collectivity: it is everything, he is only a zero.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

295. “I didn’t know the first thing about the people around me, but that didn’t matter: I was in a new world; and I had the feelings that at last I had put my finger on the secret of freedom.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

296. “Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms...”

— Simone de Beauvoir

297. “The Koran treats women with the most absolute contempt.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

298. “Being on the fringes of the world is not the best place for someone who intends to re-create it: here again, to go beyond the given, one must be deeply rooted in it. Personal accomplishments are almost impossible in human categories collectively kept in an inferior situation.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

299. “And yet we are told that femininity is in danger; we are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women. It would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity. Is this attribute something secreted by the ovaries? Or is it Platonic essence, a product of the philosophic imagination? Is a rustling petticoat enough to bring it down to earth?”

— Simone de Beauvoir

300. “She had appetites in plenty: she spent all her strength in repressing them and she underwent this denial in anger.”

— Simone de Beauvoir