697 Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

We only exist if we act.

God! when you think of all the things you could do and yet somehow never do! All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn't come fast enough. Instead of being open, you're closed up tight. Thats's the worst sin of all - the sin of omission.

(About Sartre...)His death does not separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are. It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long.

I hadn't known Chancel very well, but ten days earlier I had seen him laughing with the others around the Christmas tree. Maybe Robert was right; the distance between the living and the dead really isn't very great. And yet, like myself, those future corpses who were drinking their coffee in silence appeared ashamed to be so alive.

Aucun destin biologique, psychique, économique ne définit la figure que revêt au sein de la societé la femelle humain; c'est l'ensemble de la civilisation qui élabore ce produit intermédiaire entre le mâle et le castrat qu'on qualifie de féminin.

Le sens de la toilette féminine est manifest: il s'agit de se 'parer' et se parer c'est s'offrir; les feministes hétérosexuelles se sont montrées naguère sur ce point aussi intransiseantes que les lesbiennes: elles refusaient de faire d'elles-même une marchandise qu'on exhibem elles adoptaient des tailleurs et des feutres secs; les robes ornées, décolletées leurs semblaient le symbole de l'ordre social qu'elles combattaient.

But I was brought up on convent morals and paternal nationalism, I was getting bogged down in contradictions.

Y con la amistad pasa como con el amor físico: para que sea auténtica tiene que ser ante todo libre.

Nature asserts itself in the face of Spirit which it denies while assuming it; the individual is again found in the collectivity within which he is lost; & each man's death is fulfilled by being cancelled out into the Life of Mankind.