697 Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other...when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.

We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible.

Writing ... is a profession that can only be learned by writing.

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.

Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.

In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider ...

Eating, sleeping, cleaning - the years no longer rise up toward heaven, they lie spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won. Washing, ironing, sweeping, ferreting out rolls of lint from under wardrobes - all this halting of decay is also the denial of life; for time simultaneously creates and destroys, and only its negative aspect concerns the housekeeper.

We always come back to the same vicious circle - an extreme degree of material or intellectual poverty does away with the means of alleviating it.

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