Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

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

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

Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.

One is not born a woman, but becomes one.

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

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 most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.

Buying is a profound pleasure.

The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.

It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life’s parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.

When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.

Sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.

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.