Selected Simone de Beauvoir Quotations
• One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
• 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 none the less to exist to him also; mutually recognizing each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other.
• Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.
• This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.
• Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.
• The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concreted situation.
• Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.
• When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.
• If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through "the eternal feminine," and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman?
• To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.
• Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.
• Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.
• I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for the truth; and truth rewarded me.
• That's what I consider true generosity. You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.
• I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
• One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.
• The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them.
• The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.
• However gifted an individual is at the outset, if his or her talents cannot be developed because of his or her social condition, because of the surrounding circumstances, these talents will be still-born.
• To show your true ability is always, in a sense, to surpass the limits of your ability, to go a little beyond them: to dare, to seek, to invent; it is at such a moment that new talents are revealed, discovered, and realized.
• Since I was 21, I have never been lonely. The opportunities granted to me at the beginning helped me not only to lead a happy life but to be happy in the life I led. I have been aware of my shortcomings and my limits, but I have made the best of them. When I was tormented by what was happening in the world, it was the world I wanted to change, not my place in it.
