Quotes from Simone de Beauvoir

I think there is a great tendency toward autobiography among women today. It is perhaps facile - and I say that even though I have written one myself.

Old age is better for women than for men. First of all, they have less far to fall, since their lives are more mediocre than those of most men.

Women's mutual understanding comes from the fact that they identify themselves with each other; but for the same reason each is against the others.

Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself.

In truth we need to change the society itself, men as well as women, to change everything.

At bottom, antipsychiatry is still psychiatry. And it doesn't really address itself to women's problems.

You can't address yourself to women by speaking a language which no average woman will understand. In my opinion, it's wrong.

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

One is not born a woman - one becomes one.

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.

The emancipation of women must be the work of women themselves, independent of the class struggle.

The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one.

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

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.

For years I thought my work still lay ahead, and now I find it is behind me: there was no moment when it took place.

And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.

I've done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I've been swindled all the same because it's never anything more.

If the unconscious must express itself it will do so through the work that you do consciously or subconsciously, with words, with what you have to say.

Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately.

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.

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

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

Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours.

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