Simone de Beauvoir
One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.Collection: Sympathy
Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.Collection: Future
No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.Collection: Women
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.Collection: Truth
Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.Collection: Truth
Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.Collection: Society
It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.Collection: Death
What is an adult? A child blown up by age.Collection: Age
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.Collection: Fear
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.Collection: Truth
To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.Collection: Art
I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.Collection: Freedom
Art is an attempt to integrate evil.Collection: Art
All oppression creates a state of war.Collection: War
Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.Collection: Society
The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.Collection: Women
If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
One is not born a woman, but becomes one.
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.
Sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.
Buying is a profound pleasure.
The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them.
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 not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.
This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.
When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.
The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.
To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.
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.
Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen.
Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.Collection: Men
The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Able
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.Collection: Fate
I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myselfCollection: Life And Love
You have to start from where you are today and from what can be done.Collection: Done
Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other.Collection: Effort
I don't want to be just another blade of grass.Collection: Want
Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.Collection: Self
As long as the family and the myth of the family ... have not been destroyed, women will still be oppressed.Collection: Long
Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.Collection: Trying
Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity. The evil all arose from the fact that he had increased his needs rather than limited them; . . . As long as fresh needs continued to be created, so new frustrations would come into being. When had the decline begun? The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution - not a social or political revolution - only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.Collection: Country
Jealousy is not contemptible, real love has a beak and claws.Collection: Real
Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.Collection: Anxiety
From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.Collection: Philosophy