697 Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

The moment anyone begins making calculations or comparisons, they cease to live for the moment: the present becomes a mere pointer to the future, and all sorts of questions tend to arise.

This has always been a man’s world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.

Always the same faces, the same surroundings, the same conversations, the same problems. The more it changes, the more it repeats itself. In the end, you feel as if you’re dying alive.

The prostitute is the sum of all types of feminine slavery at once.

On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself – on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.

Between women love is contemplation; caresses are meant less to appropriate the other than to recreate oneself slowly through her; separation is eliminated, there is neither fight nor victory nor defeat; each one is both subject and object.

Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself – exactly oneself and no one else – and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else.

And yet we are told that femininity is in danger; we are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women. It would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity. Is this attribute something secreted by the ovaries? Or is it Platonic essence, a product of the philosophic imagination? Is a rustling petticoat enough to bring it down to earth?

Why does one exist? That’s not my problem. One does exist. The thing to do is to take no notice but go at it on the run and to keep on going right on until you die.