697 Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

Misogynists have often reproached intellectual women for 'letting themselves go'; but they also preach to them: if you want to be our equals, stop wearing makeup and polishing your nails. This advice is absurd. Precisely because the idea of femininity is artificially defined by customs and fashion, it is imposed on every woman from the outside[...]. The individual is not free to shape the idea of femininity at will.

In many cases, the man can commit acts with woman’s complicity that degrade her without tarnishing his lofty image.

The practical reasons invoked against legal abortion are completely unfounded; as with moral reasons, they are reduced to the old Catholic argument: the fetus has a soul, and the gates to paradise are closed to it without baptism. It is worth noting that the Church authorizes the killing of adult men in war, or when it is a question of the death penalty; but it stands on intransigent humanitarianism for the fetus.

Her home is her earthly lot, the expression of her social worth, and her intimate truth. Because she does nothing, she avidly seeks herself in what she has.

My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy.

[Woman] is simply what man decrees; thus she is called "the sex," by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex -- absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute -- she is the Other.

Il y a toujours eu des femmes; elles sont femmes par leur structure physiologique; aussi loin que l'histoire remonte, elles ont toujours été subordinnées à l'homme; leur dépendance n'est pas la conséquence d'un événement ou d'un devenir, elle n'est pas arrivée.

Cependant c'est là le premier mensonge, la première trahison de la femme: c'est celle de la vie même qui, fût-elle revêtue des formes les plus attrayantes, est toujours habitée par les ferments de la vieillesse et de la mort.

Tous les génies qui naissent femmes sont perdus pour le bonheur du public; dès que le hasard leur donne les moyens de se montrer, voyez-les atteindre aux talents les plus difficiles." Le pire handicap qu'elles aient à supporter, c'est l'éducation dont on les abrutit; l'oppresseur s'attache toujours à diminuer ceux qu'il opprime; c'est à dessein que l'homme refuse aux femmes leurs chances.