Explore Quotes by Simone De Beauvoir

Marriage is traditionally the destiny offered to women by society. Most women are married or have been, or plan to be or suffer from not being.

To show your true ability is always, in a sense, to surpass the limits of your ability, to go a little beyond them: to dare, to seek, to invent; it is at such a moment that new talents are revealed, discovered, and realized

It is for man to establish the reign of liberty in the midst of the world of the given. To gain the supreme victory, it is necessary, for one thing, that by and through their natural differentiation men and women unequivocally affirm their brotherhood.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.

Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.

This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.

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.

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.

Buying is a profound pleasure.

Art is an attempt to integrate evil.

Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.

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.

When an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior.

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.

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

All oppression creates a state of war.