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Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir

1908–1986 · lived 78 years

n. 1908-01-09, Paris · m. 1986-04-14, 14.º arrondissement de Paris

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On ne naît pas femme, on le devient .

The New Yale Book of Quotations

She appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. . . . She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.

The New Yale Book of Quotations

Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately.

Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself.

The women of today are in a fair way to dethrone the myth of femininity; they are beginning to affirm their independence in concrete ways; but they do not easily succeed in living completely the life of a human being.

Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity.

That is what chills your spine when you read an account of a suicide: not the frail corpse hanging from the window bars but what happened inside that heart immediately before.

Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one you met when you were nineteen.

There was a group of Americans taking photographs. “What barbarians!’’ said Papa. “They take photographs so that they do not have to look.”

The innumerable conflicts that set fnen and women against one another come from the fact that neither is prepared to assume all the consequences of this situation which the one has offered and the other accepted.

[L]ove was an appalling bore once you had ceased loving. All that time wasted.

The misfortune which befalls man from his once having been a child is that his liberty was at first concealed from him, and all his life he will retain the nostalgia for a time when he was ignorant of its exigencies.

Why does one exist? That’s not my problem. One does exist. The thing to do is to take no notice but go at it on the run and to keep on going right on until you die.

Woman has always been man’s dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.

It is a difficult matter for man to realize the extreme importance of social discriminations which seem outwardly insignificant but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature.

Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one being active and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one.

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.

The Second Sex (1949)

To show your true ability is always, in a sense, to surpass the limits of your ability, to go a little beyond them.

To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for the truth; and truth rewarded me.

There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

"A Very Easy Death

There is an art to “catching a husband”: “keeping” him is a profession.

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.

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

A day when I do not write tastes of ashes.

It’s frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself.

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

Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word.

Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.

Old age was growing inside me. It kept catching my eye from the depths of the mirror. I was paralyzed sometimes as I saw it make its way for me so steadily when nothing inside me was ready for it.

If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.

In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.

Simone de Beauvoir

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