697 Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me.

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.

Life can’t be bought piecemeal; it has to be purchased in bulk- all or nothing. Only there isn’t time enough for everything, that’s the tragedy of it.

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.

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

History took hold of me and never let me go thereafter.

I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me.

You can’t assume the responsibility for everything you do or don’t do.

By her eyes she clung to the world, as by her nails she clung to the sheet, so that she might not be engulfed. ‘Live! Live!