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Simone de Beauvoir on Freedom

1908–1986 France

← All quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

18 quotes

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.

The Blood of Others [Le sang des autres (1946)

To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.

Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté (1947)

The constructive activities of man take on a valid meaning only when they are assumed as a movement toward freedom.

It is for man to establish the reign of liberty in the midst of the world of the given. To gain the supreme victory, it is necessary, for one thing, that by and through their natural differentiation men and women unequivocally affirm their brotherhood.

The Second Sex (1949)

Human freedom is the ultimate, the unique end to which man should destine himself.

In order for men to become indignant or to admire, they must be conscious of their own freedom and the freedom of others.

To will oneself free is to effect the transition from nature to morality by establishing a genuine freedom on the original upsurge of our existence.

At each moment freedom is confirmed through all creation.

Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity.

To will oneself free is also to will others free.

As for us, whatever the case may be, we believe in freedom.

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.

A freedom wills itself genuinely only by willing itself as an indefinite movement through the freedom of others; as soon as it withdraws into itself, it denies itself on behalf of some object which it prefers to itself.

My freedom must not seek to trap being but to disclose it. The disclosure is the transition from being to existence. The goal which my freedom aims at is conquering existence across the always inadequate density of being.

Just as life is identified with the will-to-live, freedom always appears as a movement of liberation. It is only by prolonging itself through the freedom of others that it manages to surpass death itself and to realize itself as an indefinite unity.

Man can not positively decide between the negation and the assumption of his freedom, for as soon as he decides, he assumes it. He can not positively will not to be free for such a willing would be self-destructive.

The words "to will oneself free" have a positive and concrete meaning. If man wishes to save his existence, as only he himself can do, his original spontaneity must be raised to the height of moral freedom by taking itself as an end through the disclosure of a particular content.

Freedom realizes itself only by engaging itself in the world: to such an extent that man’s project toward freedom is embodied for him in definite acts of behavior. To will freedom and to will to disclose being are one and the same choice; hence, freedom takes a positive and constructive step which causes being to pass to existence in a movement which is constantly surpassed.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Simone de Beauvoir (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.