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.

— Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

She compensated for this sense of inferiority by making fun of everything. I did not notice it then, but she never made fun of my faults, only of my virtues;.

— Simone de Beauvoir

I know nothing, nothing. I not only have no answer to give, but I haven’t even found a satisfactory way of propounding the questions.

— Simone de Beauvoir

My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute.

— Simone de Beauvoir

He draws the motivations of his moral attitude from within the character which he has given himself and from within the universe which is its correlative.

— Simone de Beauvoir

The means, it is said, will be justified by the end; but it is the means which define it, and if it is contradicted at the moment that it is set up, the whole enterprise sinks into absurdity.

— Simone de Beauvoir

Lynching is an absolute evil; it represents the survival of an obsolete civilization, the perpetuation of a struggle of races which has to disappear;.

— Simone de Beauvoir

I told myself that as long as there were books I could be sure of being happy.

— Simone de Beauvoir

We only exist if we act.

— Simone de Beauvoir

With regard to us, she often displayed a cruel unkindness that was more thoughtless than sadistic: her desire was not to cause us unhappiness but to prove her own power to herself.

— Simone de Beauvoir

It must be added that the men who most respect embryonic life are the same ones who do not hesitate to send adults to death in war.

— Simone de Beauvoir

Todas las mujeres se creen diferentes; todas piensan que ciertas cosas no pueden sucederles, y todas ellas se equivocan.

— Simone de Beauvoir

What stops them is that as soon as they give the word “end” its double meaning of goal and fulfillment they clearly perceive this ambiguity of their condition, which is the most fundamental of all: that every living movement is a sliding toward death. But if they are willing to look it in the face they also discover that every movement toward death is life.

— Simone de Beauvoir

The goal which my freedom aims at is conquering existence across the always inadequate density of being.

— Simone de Beauvoir

Love is then renunciation of all possession, of all confusion. One renounces being in order that there may be that being which one is not.

— Simone de Beauvoir

Everything that men have written about women should be viewed with suspicion, because they are both judge and party,’ wrote Poulain de la Barre,11 a little-known seventeenth-century feminist.

— Simone de Beauvoir

Time vanishes behind those who leave this world, and the older I get the more my past years draw together.

— Simone de Beauvoir

One can not, without absurdity, indefinitely sacrifice each generation to the following one; human history would then be only an endless succession of negations which would never return to the positive.

— Simone de Beauvoir

One has no right to make up one’s mind about the future in advance.

— Simone de Beauvoir

I haven’t abandoned you, my little ally, my heart. I kiss you with all my soul.

— Simone de Beauvoir

I’m not tragic these days, I don’t weep, but I feel alone, bewildered, far from you, far from everything – nothing has any meaning.

— Simone de Beauvoir
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