110+ Simone de Beauvoir Quotes On Gender, Freedom And Marriage

Simone de Beauvoir was a French writer, philosopher, political activist, and social theorist. She is best known for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. She is also known for her open relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, which was both romantic and intellectual. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Simone de Beauvoir on gender, love, freedom.

Top 10 Simone De Beauvoir Quotes

1. Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.
2. 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 myself
3. No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.
4. One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.
5. All oppression creates a state of war.
6. When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.
7. The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.
8. She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.
9. Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms. For each of them, love would be the revelation of the self through the gift of the self and the enrichment of the universe.
10. I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.

Simone de Beauvoir Image Quotes

All oppression creates a state of war. — Simone de Beauvoir

The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women. — Simone de Beauvoir

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. — Simone de Beauvoir

Buying is a profound pleasure. — Simone de Beauvoir

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom. — Simone de Beauvoir

To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job. — Simone de Beauvoir

Simone De Beauvoir Short Quotes

• Buying is a profound pleasure.
• You have to start from where you are today and from what can be done.
• If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
• What is an adult? A child blown up by age.
• What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.
• From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.
• Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.
• Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.
• It's only arrogance if you're wrong.
• Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.

Simone de Beauvoir Quotes About Love

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. — Simone de Beauvoir

Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you've lost that, you've lost everything. — Simone de Beauvoir

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

There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless. — Simone de Beauvoir

She offered her mouth to him, as if enchanted. A Persian princess, a little Indian, a fox, a morning glory, a lovely wisteria--it always pleased them when you told them they looked like something, like something else. — Simone de Beauvoir

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. — Simone de Beauvoir

To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself. — Simone de Beauvoir

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

Jealousy is not contemptible, real love has a beak and claws. — Simone de Beauvoir

The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams. — Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir Quotes About Freedom

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom. — Simone de Beauvoir

Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise." (p. 248) — Simone de Beauvoir

Choice springs from the totality of the person. Thus, to study, to analyze what a person is, does not eliminate the idea of freedom. — Simone de Beauvoir

To will freedom and to will to disclose being are one and the same choice; hence, freedom takes a positive and constructive step which causes being to pass to existence in a movement which is constantly surpassed. — Simone de Beauvoir

Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies. — Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir Quotes About Marriage

To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job. — Simone de Beauvoir

Marriage is a career which brings about more benefits than many others. — Simone de Beauvoir

The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength -- each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. — 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. — Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir Quotes About Death

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. — Simone de Beauvoir

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. — Simone de Beauvoir

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. — Simone de Beauvoir

Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death. — Simone de Beauvoir

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

For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay. — Simone de Beauvoir

The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die. — Simone de Beauvoir

Anyway I know only too well that all life is nothing but a brief reprieve from death. — Simone de Beauvoir

Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death. — Simone de Beauvoir

The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her. — Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir Quotes About Feminist

But women do not say 'We', except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say 'women', and women use the same word in referring to themselves. — Simone de Beauvoir

This is certainly a very tricky point: How to ally yourself to other leftist forces without losing your feminist specificity. — Simone de Beauvoir

If the writer is a woman, feminist or not, it will give the language something that it would not have if it had been used by a man. — Simone de Beauvoir

To refuse everything, to say, even when there is something which really should be done, "Ah, that's no longer feminist," is a pessimistic, even masochistic tendency in women, the result of having been habituated to inertia, to pessimism. — Simone de Beauvoir

No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. — Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir Quotes About Life

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. — Simone de Beauvoir

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. — Simone de Beauvoir

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end. — Simone de Beauvoir

The nearer I come to the end of my days, the more I am enabled to see that strange thing, a life, and to see it whole. — Simone de Beauvoir

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying. — Simone de Beauvoir

The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning. — Simone de Beauvoir

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. — Simone de Beauvoir

Old age is life's parody. — Simone de Beauvoir

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning. — Simone de Beauvoir

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. — Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir Quotes About World

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. — Simone de Beauvoir

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. — Simone de Beauvoir

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

The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or castle; it stands for permanence and separation from the world. — Simone de Beauvoir

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men. — Simone de Beauvoir

It's important that you think of your relationship with the world and the way you can express that world and that you not be stopped if it scandalizes or embarrasses; but you must not look for scandal or for the avant-garde as a thing in itself. — Simone de Beauvoir

Let women be provided with living strength of their own. Let them have the means to attack the world and wrest from it their own subsistence, and their dependence will be abolished -- that of man also. — Simone de Beauvoir

Many things would be changed for Americans if they would only admit that there is ill-luck in this world and that misfortune is not a priori a crime. — Simone de Beauvoir

One can hardly tell women that washing up saucepans is their divine mission, [so] they are told that bringing up children is their divine mission. But the way things are in the world, bringing up children has a great deal in common with washing up saucepans. — Simone de Beauvoir

It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world. — Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir Quotes About Strength

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. — Simone de Beauvoir

Let women be provided with living strength of their own. — Simone de Beauvoir

On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself -- on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life... — Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir Quotes About Giving

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

There are so many problems. Women can go to work on these as well without giving up their feminism. — Simone de Beauvoir

Dwelling-place and food are useful for life but give it no significance: the immediate goals of the housekeeper are only means, not true ends. — Simone de Beauvoir

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

Simone de Beauvoir Famous Quotes And Sayings

All oppression creates a state of war. — Simone de Beauvoir

I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger. — Simone de Beauvoir

The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women. — Simone de Beauvoir

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 — Simone de Beauvoir

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. — Simone de Beauvoir

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom. — Simone de Beauvoir

To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job. — Simone de Beauvoir

However gifted an individual is at the outset, if his or her talents cannot be developed because of his or her social condition, because of the surrounding circumstances, these talents will be still-born. — Simone de Beauvoir

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. — Simone de Beauvoir

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. — Simone de Beauvoir

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. — Simone de Beauvoir

Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. But we have seen that it is one of the lies of the serious mind to attempt to give the word "useful" an absolute meaning; nothing is useful if it is not useful to man; nothing is useful to man if the latter is not in a position to define his own ends and values, if he is not free. — Simone de Beauvoir

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. — Simone de Beauvoir

To be feminist doesn't mean simply to do nothing, to reduce yourself to total impotence under the pretext of refusing masculine values. There is a problematic, a very difficult dialectic between accepting power and refusing it, accepting certain masculine values, and wanting to transform them. I think it's worth a try. — Simone de Beauvoir

You have never had any confidence in him. And if he has no confidence in himself it is because he sees himself through your eyes. — Simone de Beauvoir

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it. — Simone de Beauvoir

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

I would stand transfixed before the windows of the confectioners' shops, fascinated by the luminous sparkle of candied fruits, the cloudy lustre of jellies, the kaleidoscope inflorescence of acidulated fruit drops - red, green, orange, violet: I coveted the colours themselves as much as the pleasure they promised me. — Simone de Beauvoir

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

The Sahara was a spectacle as alive as the sea. The tints of the dunes changed according to the time of day and the angle of the light: golden as apricots from far off, when we drove close to them they turned to freshly made butter; behind us they grew pink; from sand to rock, the materials of which the desert was made varied as much as its tints. — Simone de Beauvoir

…but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation. — Simone de Beauvoir

The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change. — Simone de Beauvoir

...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen. — Simone de Beauvoir

When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form. — Simone de Beauvoir

Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself. — Simone de Beauvoir

Between women love is contemplative; caresses are intended less to gain possession of the other than gradually to re-create the self through her; separateness is abolished, there is no struggle, no victory, no defeat; in exact reciprocity each is at once subject and object, sovereign and slave; duality become mutuality. — Simone de Beauvoir

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. — Simone de Beauvoir

The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels. — Simone de Beauvoir

Patience is one of those feminine qualities which have their origin in our oppression but should be preserved after our liberation. — Simone de Beauvoir

One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius. — Simone de Beauvoir

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

My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. 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

A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into? — Simone de Beauvoir

The emancipation of women must be the work of women themselves, independent of the class struggle. — Simone de Beauvoir

No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself. — Simone de Beauvoir

The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it. — Simone de Beauvoir

Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized. — Simone de Beauvoir

Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly. — Simone de Beauvoir

Given masculine norms, it is clear that women are more likely to be considered crazy - I'm not saying to be crazy. — Simone de Beauvoir

As soon as a woman re- fuses to be perfectly happy doing housework eight hours a day, society has a tendency to want to do a lobotomy on her. — Simone de Beauvoir

In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid. — Simone de Beauvoir

The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy...It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present. — Simone de Beauvoir

History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born. — Simone de Beauvoir

I never thought of myself as being in the avant-garde. I said what I had to say, as I was able to say it. — Simone de Beauvoir

immortality is a terrible curse. — Simone de Beauvoir

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. — Simone de Beauvoir

It's frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself. It seems unfair. You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do --or don't do. — Simone de Beauvoir

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. — Simone de Beauvoir

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 making its way toward me so steadily when nothing inside me was ready for it. — Simone de Beauvoir

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. — Simone de Beauvoir

On ne na|"t pas femme: on le devient. One is not born a woman: one becomes a woman. — Simone de Beauvoir

When Goya was 80 he drew an ancient man propped on two sticks, with a great mass of white hair and beard all over his face, and the inscription, "I am still learning." — Simone de Beauvoir

It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them. — Simone de Beauvoir

My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together. — Simone de Beauvoir

If you are truly on the left, if you reject ideas of power and hierarchy, what you want is equality. Otherwise, it won't work at all. — Simone de Beauvoir

The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one. — Simone de Beauvoir

The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another. — Simone de Beauvoir

Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess. — 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. — Simone de Beauvoir

Life Lessons by Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir's life and work can teach us many lessons about living a meaningful life. She believed that we should strive to live authentically and to question the status quo. She also encouraged us to live with courage and to embrace our freedom to choose our own paths.