Top 380 Simone de Beauvoir Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Morality resides in the painfulness of an indefinite questioning.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

352. “I didn’t understand: you don’t believe what you believe on purpose. Could you be punished because certain ideas come into your mind?”

— Simone de Beauvoir

353. “One of the most remarkable features to be noted as we survey the scale of animal life is that as we go up, individuality is seen to be more and more fully developed. At the bottom, life is concerned only in the survival of the species as a whole; at the top, life seeks expression through particular individuals, while accomplishing also the survival of the group.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

354. “People say you have to have faith because believing is irrational. So I end up thinking that the more irrational things seem, the more likely they are to be true.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

355. “Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

356. “The goal which my freedom aims at is conquering existence across the always inadequate density of being.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

357. “It must be added that the men who most respect embryonic life are the same ones who do not hesitate to send adults to death in war.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

358. “There are photographs of both of us, taken at about the same time: I am eighteen, she is nearly forty. Today I could almost be her mother and the grandmother of that sad-eyed girl. I am so sorry for them – for me because I am so young and I understand nothing; for her because her future is closed and she has never understood anything.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

359. “Love is then renunciation of all possession, of all confusion. One renounces being in order that there may be that being which one is not.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

360. “I cannot withdraw into myself. I exist, outside myself and everywhere in the world. There is not an inch of my path which does not encroach on the path of another: there is no way of being that can prevent me from overflowing myself at every moment. This life that I weave with my own substance, it offers other men a thousand unknown faces, it crosses impetuously their fate.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

361. “With regard to us, she often displayed a cruel unkindness that was more thoughtless than sadistic: her desire was not to cause us unhappiness but to prove her own power to herself.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

362. “Todas las mujeres se creen diferentes; todas piensan que ciertas cosas no pueden sucederles, y todas ellas se equivocan.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

363. “To be no one, all things considered, is something of a privilege.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

364. “The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

365. “I had had a general sort of idea that the life I had behind me was a landscape in which I could wander as I pleased, gradually exploring its winding and its hidden valleys. No. I could repeat names and dates, just as a schoolboy can bring out a carefully learned lesson on a subject he knows nothing about. And at long intervals there arose worn, faded images, as abstract as those in my old French history: they stood out arbitrarily, against a white background.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

366. “Making money does not seem to me a very elevating ambition.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

367. “We only exist if we act.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

368. “When one has lived so much for others it is quite hard to turn oneself back again – to live for oneself.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

369. “Time vanishes behind those who leave this world, and the older I get the more my past years draw together.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

370. “Likewise, the most mediocre of males believes himself a demigod next to women.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

371. “Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

372. “From the hour you’re born you begin to die. But between birth and death there’s life.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

373. “The telephone – it is not a thing that brings people nearer: it underlines their remoteness.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

374. “What is beyond doubt is that until now women’s possibilities have been stifled and lost to humanity, and in her and everyone’s interest it is high time she be left to take her own chances.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

375. “Religion could do no more for my mother than the hope of posthumous success could do for me. Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

376. “How old do you have to be before you have the right to think: this is forever?”

— Simone de Beauvoir

377. “Moreover, humanity is something other than a species: it is an historical becoming; it is defined by the way it assumes natural facticity.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

378. “It is useless to try to integrate life and death and to behave rationally in the presence of something that is not rational: each must manage as well as he can in the tumult of his feelings. I can understand all last wishes and the total absence of them: the hugging of the bones or the abandonment of the body of the one you love to the common grave.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

379. “Before me lies a gaping void. And the anguish comes into its own, alone in the void, beyond the vanished things. I am alone. I am that anguish which exists alone, in spite of me; I am merged with that blind existence. In spite of me and yet issuing only from myself. Refuse to exist: I exist. Decide to exist: I exist. Refuse, decide. I exist. There will be dawn.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

380. “Oh! This trick of my heart that wants to diminish you in order to suffer less. Is it suffering? Despite everything, I know that you are so close to me, and that it is towards me, not towards someone else, that you are coming; but how far away is that radiant domain...”

— Simone de Beauvoir

381. “To ‘remake woman’, society would have had to have already made her really man’s equal.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

382. “Their behavior is defined and can be judged only within this given situation, and it is possible that in this situation, limited like every human situation, they realize a perfect assertion of their freedom. But once there appears a possibility of liberation, it is resignation of freedom not to exploit the possibility, a resignation which implies dishonesty and which is a positive fault.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

383. “Every authoritarian party regards thought as a danger and reflection as a crime.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

384. “The eternal youth of the world makes me feel breathless. Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

385. “Es una realidad que la historia de la humanidad es hermosa, es una pena que la del humano sea tan triste.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

386. “From the top of the hill I look at the path travelled, and the entire path is present in the joy of my success. The walk gives the rest its worth, and my thirst gives the glass of water its worth. A whole past comes together in the moment of enjoyment.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

387. “She was often late, not because she didn’t care, but because she had too many contradictory cares.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

388. “The thing I’d like very much to know is what people do with all the time they now save,’ Fosca said.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

389. “What stops them is that as soon as they give the word “end” its double meaning of goal and fulfillment they clearly perceive this ambiguity of their condition, which is the most fundamental of all: that every living movement is a sliding toward death. But if they are willing to look it in the face they also discover that every movement toward death is life.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

390. “It is because there are real dangers, real failures and real earthly damnation that words like victory, wisdom, or joy have meaning. Nothing is decided in advance, and it is because man has something to lose and because he can lose that he can also win.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

391. “The tyrant asserts himself as a transcendence; he considers others as pure immanences: he thus arrogates to himself the right to treat them like cattle.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

392. “Taking without being taken in the anguish of becoming prey is the dangerous game of adolescent feminine sexuality.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

393. “I could have been someone else, but then it would be someone else questioning herself about her self.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

394. “They’re devouring my life with their mouths, with their eyes.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

395. “The goal toward which I surpass myself must appear to me as a point of departure toward a new act of surpassing.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

396. “I have so much love in me that I would like to cry;.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

397. “When you love someone, you must give the people he loves credit for being of some value.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

398. “No existe muerte natural: nada de lo que sucede al hombre es natural puesto que su sola presencia cuestiona al mundo. Todos los hombres son mortales: pero para todos los hombres la muerte es un accidente y, aunque la concozca y la acepte, es una violencia indebida.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

399. “Destiny is not what limits her.”

— Simone de Beauvoir