Simone De Beauvoir Quotes

...her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

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 no to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

Woman has ovaries and a uterus; such are the particular conditions that lock her in her subjectivity; some even say she thinks with her hormones. Man vainly forgets that his anatomy also contains hormones and testicles. He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world that he believes he apprehends in all objectivity, whereas he considers woman's body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that particularizes it.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

The fact is that men encounter more complicity in their woman companions than the oppressor usually finds in the oppressed; and in bad faith they use it as a pretext to declare that woman wanted the destiny they imposed on her. We have seen that in reality her whole education conspires to bar her from paths of revolt and adventure; all of society - beginning with her respected parents - lies to her in extolling the high value of love, devotion, and the gift of self and in concealing the fact that neither lover, husband nor children will be disposed to bear the burdensome responsibility of it. She cheerfully accepts these lies because they invite her to take the easy slope: and that is the worst of the crimes committed against her; from her childhood and throughout her life, she is spoiled, she is corrupted by the fact that this resignation, tempting to any existent anxious about her freedom, is mean to be her vocation; if one encourages a child to be lazy by entertaining him all day, without giving him the occasion to study, without showing him its value, no one will say when he reaches the age of man that he chose to be incapable and ignorant; this is how the woman is raised, without ever being taught the necessity of assuming her own existence; she readily lets herself count on the protection, love, help and guidance of others; she lets herself be fascinated by the hope of being able to realise her being without doing anything. She is wrong to yield to this temptation; but the man is ill advised to reproach her for it since it is he himself who tempted her.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

How could women ever have had genius when all possibility of accomplishing a work of genius - or just a work - was refused them?

~ Simone De Beauvoir

How could van Gogh have been born woman? A woman would not have been sent on mission to Boringe, she would not have felt men's misery as her own crime, she would not have sought redemption; so she would never have painted van Gogh's sunflowers. And this without taking into account that the painter's kind of life - the solitude in Arles, going to cafés, whorehouses, everything that feed into van Gogh's art by feeding his sensibility - would have been prohibited to her. A woman could never have become Kafka: in her doubts and anxieties, she would never have recognised the anguish of Man driven from paradise.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

In truth, to go for a walk with one's eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial, perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that right now they do most obviously exist.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

Scriassine studied me in turn. You're not so dumb, you know. Generally I dislike intelligent women, maybe because they're not intelligent enough. They always want to prove to themselves, and to everyone else, how terribly smart they are. So all they do is talk and never understand anything. What struck me the first time I saw you was that way you have of keeping quiet.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

The relation of woman to husband, of of daughter to father, of sister to brother, is a relation of vassalage.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

she gives birth in pain, she heals males' wounds, she nurses the newborn and buries the dead; of man she knows all that offends his pride and humiliates his will. While inclining before him and submitting flesh to spirit, she remains on the carnal borders of the spirit; and she contests the sharpness of hard masculine architecture by softening the angles; she introduces free luxury and unforeseen grace.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

; the man who does not understand a woman is happy to replace his subjective deficiency with an objective resistance; instead of admitting his ignorance, he recognizes the presence of a mystery exterior to himself: here is an excuse that flatters his laziness and vanity at the same time.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

The relation of woman to husband, of daughter to father, of sister to brother, is a relation of vassalage.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

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

~ Simone De Beauvoir

The little girl feels that her body is escaping her, that it is no longer the clear expression of her individuality: it becomes foreign to her; and at the same moment she is grasped by others as a thing: on the street, eyes follow her, her body is subject to comments; she would like to become invisible; she is afraid of becoming flesh and afraid to show her flesh.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

: woman is an eminently poetic reality since man projects onto her everything he is not resolved to be.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

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

Girls are weighed down by restrictions, boys with demands - two equally harmful disciplines.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

We will not let ourselves be intimidated by the number and violence of attacks against women; nor be fooled by the self-serving praise showered on the “real woman”; nor be won over by men’s enthusiasm for her destiny, a destiny they would not for the world want to share.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

A woman's situation, i.e those meanings derived from the total context in which she comes to maturity, disposes her to apprehend her body not as instrument of her transcendence, but an object destined for another.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

In oppressing, one becomes oppressed. Men are enchained by reason of their very sovereignty; it is because they alone earn money that their wives demand checks, it is because they alone engage in a business or profession that their wives require them to be successful, it is because they alone embody transcendence that their wives wish to rob them of it by taking charge...

~ Simone De Beauvoir

I was convinced that I would be, that I was already, one in a million.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

Suddenly I was struck motionless: I was living through the first chapter of a novel in which I was the heroine; she was still almost a child, but we, too, were growing up.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

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

In the old days the worst part of my depression used to be the astonishment it caused me, the scandalized way in which I fought against it. Nowadays, on the other hand, I accept it cheerfully enough, like an old familiar friend.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

The fear of death never left me; I couldn't get used to the thought; I would still sometimes shake and weep with terror. By contrast, the fact of existence here and now sometimes took on a glorious splendour.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other. The reciprocity of their relations will not do away with the miracles – desire, possession, love, dream, adventure – worked by the division of human beings into two separate categories; and the words that move us – giving, conquering, uniting – will not lose their meaning. On the contrary, when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

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

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

Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

Men’s economic privilege, their social value, the prestige of marriage, the usefulness of masculine support—all these encourage women to ardently want to please men. They are on the whole still in a state of serfdom. It follows that woman knows and chooses herself not as she exists for herself but as man defines her. She thus has to be described first as men dream of her since her being-for-men is one of the essential factors of her concrete condition.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

What do you believe in ?People's sufferings, and the fact that it is abominable. One should do everything to abolish it. To tell you the truth, nothing else seems to me of any importance.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

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

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

~ Simone De Beauvoir

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

Trudging alone along that black road, sometimes in the teeth of wind and rain, and watching the white distant gleam of convolvulus through the park railings, gave me an exhilarating sensation of adventure.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

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