Quotes from Simone de Beauvoir

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

All oppression creates a state of war.

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

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.

A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong.

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."

Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word. Machines won't change human nature.

The American woman's inequality with men is proved by her defiant attitude.

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

From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.

Habit has a kind of poetry.

I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.

Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear without having so much as a smile for the young future.

One is not born a genius one becomes a genius.

If you haven't been happy very young you can still be happy later on but it's much harder. You need more luck.

To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.

Tragedies are all right for a while: you are concerned, you are curious, you feel good. And then it gets repetitive, it doesn't advance, it grows dreadfully boring: it is so very boring, even for me.

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

The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.

The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.

The individuals who seem to us most outstanding, who are honored with the name of genius, are those who have proposed to enact the fate of all humanity in their personal existences.

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.

Live with no time-out.

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.