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1908–1986 France
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir (9 January 1908 – 14 April 1986) was a French author and existentialist philosopher. She is now most famous for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex [Le Deuxième Sexe], a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism, and her long personal relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre.
France Activists Authors Autobiographers Biographers Also known as: De Beauvoir, Simone, Simone De Beauvoir, One is not born a woman
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102 quotes
Art reveals the transitory as an absolute; and as the transitory existence is perpetuated through the centuries, art too, through the centuries, must perpetuate this never-to-be-finished revelation.
There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die; but for every man his death is an accident and even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.
Une Mort Très Douce (1964)
After wars peace, after peace, another war. Every day men are born and others die.
All Men are Mortal (1946)
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.
The Coming of Age (1970)
The rejection of existence is still another way of existing.
They were walking side by side, but each was alone.
All Men are Mortal (1946)
To will oneself free is also to will others free.
In telling a story, in depicting it, one makes it exist in its particularity with its beginning and its end, its glory or its shame; and this is the way it actually must be lived.
Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.
The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
As for us, whatever the case may be, we believe in freedom.
From primitive times to our own, intercourse has always been considered a "service" for which the male thanks the woman by giving her presents or assuring her maintenance; but to serve is to give oneself a master; there is no reciprocity in this relation.
The Second Sex (1949)
We see that no existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself. It appeals to the existence of others.
Woman is an existent who is called upon to make herself object; as subject she has an aggressive element in her sensuality which is not satisfied on the male body: hence the conflicts that her eroticism must somehow overcome.
The Second Sex (1949)
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.
It is the abortive movement of man toward being which is his very existence, it is through the failure which he has assumed that he asserts himself as a freedom. To want to prohibit a man from error is to forbid him to fulfill his own existence, it is to deprive him of life.
We were two of a kind, and our relationship would endure as long as we did: but it could not make up entirely for the fleeting riches to be had from encounters with different people.
Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence. The man who seeks to justify his life must want freedom itself absolutely and above everything else.
The individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of him.
The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
No man can save himself alone.
The vote should really be the expression of a concrete will, the choice of a representative capable of defending, within the general framework of the country and the world, the particular interests of his electors.
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