Best 425 quotes of Simone De Beauvoir on MyQuotes

A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into?

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

‎A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.

A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.

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.

Ah, if only there were two of me, she thought, one who spoke and the other who listened, one who lived and one who watched, how I would love myself! I would envy no one.

A life is such a strange object, at one moment translucent, at another utterly opaque, an object I make with my own hands, an object imposed on me, an object for which the world provides the raw material and then steals it from me again, pulverized by events, scattered, broken, scored yet retaining its unity; how heavy it is and how inconsistent: this contradiction breeds many misunderstandings.

All oppression creates a state of war.

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.

All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn´t come fast enough. Instead of being open, you´re closed up tight. That´s the worst sin of all - the sin of omission.

A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.

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

Anais Nin shows an occasional grace in writing, but her work is quite foreign to me, precisely because she wants so much to be feminine and not feminist. And then she is so gaga before so many men. She talks about men I know in France, men who were less than nothing, and she considers them kings, extraordinary people.

And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.

Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.

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

Art is an attempt to integrate evil.

As long as the family and the myth of the family ... have not been destroyed, women will still be oppressed.

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.

At bottom, antipsychiatry is still psychiatry. And it doesn't really address itself to women's problems.

At the moment of their emancipation, women have a need to write their own histories.

Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms. For each of them, love would be the revelation of the self through the gift of the self and the enrichment of the universe.

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.

Between women love is contemplative; caresses are intended less to gain possession of the other than gradually to re-create the self through her; separateness is abolished, there is no struggle, no victory, no defeat; in exact reciprocity each is at once subject and object, sovereign and slave; duality become mutuality.

But I must admit I didn´t like that idea; do the same thing as everyone else. Eating to live, living to eat - that had been the nightmare of my adolescence. If it meant going back to that, if would be just as well to turn on the gas at once. But I suppose everyone thinks of things like that: let´s turn on the gas at once. And you don´t turn it on.

But women do not say 'We', except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say 'women', and women use the same word in referring to themselves.

Buying is a profound pleasure.

Buying is profound pleasure.

Can one say that there is a way of crying out, of speaking, which is properly feminine? Personally, I don't think so. In the end, I find this is another way of putting women in a kind of singularity, a ghetto, which is not what I want. I want them to be singular and universal at the same time.

Ce n'est gue'  re que dans les asiles que les coquettes gardent avec ente"  tement une foi entie'  re en des regards absents; normalement, elles re  clament des te  moins. Women fond of dress are hardly ever entirely satisfied not to be seen, except among the insane; usually they want witnesses.

Choice springs from the totality of the person. Thus, to study, to analyze what a person is, does not eliminate the idea of freedom.

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

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

Cooking is revolution and creation.

...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.

Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.

Each person has his or her own very particular history and after all, the unconscious is the most secret part of ourselves.

Eating, sleeping, cleaning - the years no longer rise up toward heaven, they lie spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won. Washing, ironing, sweeping, ferreting out rolls of lint from under wardrobes - all this halting of decay is also the denial of life; for time simultaneously creates and destroys, and only its negative aspect concerns the housekeeper.

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.

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.

Every time I start on a new book, I am a beginner again. I doubt myself, I grow discouraged, all the work accomplished in the past is as though it never was, my first drafts are so shapeless that it seems impossible to go on with the attempt at all, right up until the moment - always imperceptible, there, too, there is a break - when it is has become impossible not to finish it.

Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.

Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness.

Feminism is a revolutionary movement which is different from the class struggle movement, the proletarian movement, but which is a movement which must be leftist. By that I mean at the extreme left, a movement working to overthrow the whole society.

Feminism is one way of attacking society as it now exists.

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

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. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.

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.

For years I thought my work still lay ahead, and now I find it is behind me: there was no moment when it took place.

Françoise could not help taking a surreptitious glance at Xavière: she gave a start of amazement. Xavière was no longer watching, her head was lowered. Françoise barely suppressed a scream. The girl was pressing the lighted end against her skin, a bitter smile curling her lips. It was an intimate, solitary smile, like that of a half-wit; the voluptuous, tortured smile of a woman possessed of some secret pleasure.