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Simone de Beauvoir on Life

1908–1986 France

← All quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

10 quotes

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

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

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 Coming of Age (1970)

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.

Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness.

Man can find a justification of his own existence only in the existence of other men.

To exist is to make oneself a lack of being; it is to cast oneself into the world.

The rejection of existence is still another way of existing.

We see that no existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself. It appeals to the existence of others.

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.

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.

Attribution

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