Quotes from Simone de Beauvoir

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

When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.

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

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.

She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.

One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others.

When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].

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.

That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.

her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.

A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself.

On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her 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 and not of mortal danger.

No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.

To lose confidence in one's body is to lose confidence in oneself.

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.

All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception.

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.

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 absolute truth.

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.

I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.

The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project

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

If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it "a discussion

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