Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

Be loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody.

Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.

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.

Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.

When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.

I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself

Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male’s superiority.

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.

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.

To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.

To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.

As long as the family and the myth of the family … have not been destroyed, women will still be oppressed.

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.