Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.

Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.

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

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.

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.

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

What is an adult? A child blown up by age.

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

To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.

One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.

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.

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

When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.

Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.

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