697 Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

Woman has always been man’s dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.

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.

The world brings itself into being before my eyes in an everlasting present: I grow used to its different aspects so quickly that it does not seem to me to change.

I don’t want to be just another blade of grass.

He draws the motivations of his moral attitude from within the character which he has given himself and from within the universe which is its correlative.

It is not a matter of approaching a fixed limit: absolute Knowledge or the happiness of man or the perfection of beauty; all human effort would then be doomed to failure, for with each step forward the horizon recedes a step; for man it is a matter of pursuing the expansion of his existence and of retrieving this very effort as an absolute. Science.

It’s not a very big step from contentment to complacency.

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

Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you’ve lost that, you’ve lost everything.