Explore Quotes by Simone De Beauvoir

The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady, yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet.

To give space when what one most yearns for is closeness, that is both the great test and great tragedy of love.

It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency.

Habit has a kind of poetry.

I willingly trust myself to chance. I let my thoughts wander, I digress, not only sitting at my work, but all day long, all night even. It often happens that a sentence suddenly runs through my head before I go to bed, or when I am unable to sleep, and I get up again and write it down.

It must be said in addition that the men with the most scrupulous respect for embryonic life are also those who are most zealous when it comes to condemning adults to death in war.

One can not start by saying that our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends upon us to give it importance.

Live with no time-out.

Old age is life's parody.

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.

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

There are cases where the slave does not know his servitude and where it is necessary to bring the seed of his liberation to him from the outside: his submission is not enough to justify the tyranny which is imposed upon him.

Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours.

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

Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.

The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.

The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.

No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.

The individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of himself.

Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.

Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom.