quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)

"It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living."
— Simone de Beauvoir

"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

"All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)

"If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat."
— Simone de Beauvoir

"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.
"
— Simone de Beauvoir

"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others."
— Simone de Beauvoir

"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion"
— Simone de Beauvoir

"People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)

"(What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.)"
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)

"She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)

"One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)

"Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me"
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)

"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 (The Woman Destroyed)

"There was once a man who lost his shadow. I forget what happened to him, but it was dreadful. As for me, I've lost my own image. I did not look at it often; but it was there, in the background, just as Maurice had drawn it for me. A straightforward, genuine, "authentic" woman, with out mean-mindedness, uncompromising, but at the same time understanding, indulgent, sensitive, deeply feeling, intensely aware of things and of people, passionately devoted to those she loved and creating happiness for them. A fine life, serene, full, "harmonious." It is dark: I cannot see myself anymore. And what do the others see? Maybe something hideous."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)

"The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project"
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)

"When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...]."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)

"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 (The Woman Destroyed)

"On ne nait pas femme, on le devient."
— Simone de Beauvoir (Le Deuxième Sexe)

"I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me."
— Simone de Beauvoir

"Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility."
— Simone de Beauvoir

"Les livres que j'aimais devinrent une Bible où je puisais des conseils et des secours. "
— Simone de Beauvoir (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter)

"I am incapable of conceiving infinity and yet I do not accept finity."
— Simone de Beauvoir

"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 (La Force Des Choses, Tome II)

"--There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time.
--But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)

"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 (The Woman Destroyed)

"Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)

"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 (The Woman Destroyed)

"My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)

"There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial...Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost...I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself!"
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)

"The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return."
— Simone de Beauvoir

"She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)

"The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself."
— Simone de Beauvoir (Old Age)

"No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.
"
— Simone de Beauvoir

"Sex pleasure in women is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken."
— Simone de Beauvoir

"On the evenings when my parents held parties, the drawing-room mirrors multiplied to infinity the scintillations of a crystal chandelier. Mama would take her seat at the grand piano to accompany a lady dressed in a cloud of tulle who played the violin and a cousin who performed on a cello. I would crack between my teeth the candied shell of an artificial fruit, and a burst of light would illuminate my palate with a taste of blackcurrant or pineapple: all the colours, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held the whole party in my mouth."
— Simone de Beauvoir (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter)

"The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)

"...which we welcomed precisely because it happened to suit our convenience."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Prime of Life: The Autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir)

"It must feel wonderfully strange when, like Manette, one stands there, the only witness to a vanished world."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)

""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 (The Mandarins)

"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."
— Simone de Beauvoir (After the War: Force of Circumstance, 1944-1952)

"She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life."
— Simone de Beauvoir

"Je crois que je comprends bien comment ca peut te faire. Nous avons essayée de batir notre amour par-delà les instants, mais seuls les instants sont surs. Pour le reste on a besoin de foi; et la foi, est-ce courage ou paresse?"
— Simone de Beauvoir (She Came to Stay)

"There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning."
— Simone de Beauvoir

"'There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.'

'There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me.'"
— Simone de Beauvoir (All Men Are Mortal)

"I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short."
— Simone de Beauvoir

"A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself. "
— Simone de Beauvoir

"Les cas extrêmes nous attachaient, au même titre que les névroses et les psychoses : on y retrouvait exagérées, épurées, dotées d'un saisissant relief les attitudes et les passions des gens qu'on appelle normaux."
— Simone de Beauvoir (La Force De l'Age)

"I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom."
— Simone de Beauvoir

"Women's mutual understanding comes from the fact that they identify themselves with each other; but for the same reason each is against the others."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)