Simone de Beauvoir was born on January 9, 1908 in Paris into a wealthy family. She grew up with a strict and catholic education.
From a very young age, de Beauvoir showed sign of her intellectual abilities and at the age of fourteen, she decided to become a writer.
She attended the University of Paris and studied mathematics, literature and philosophy. It was there that she met Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom she would develop a relationship.
At the age of 21, Simone de Beauvoir was awarded the second place in the philosophy aggregation competition, just behind Jean-Paul Sartre. Together with the latter, Raymond Aron, Michel Leiris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Boris Vian and other left-wing intellectuals, she founded the magazine “Modern Times” in 1945 whose aim was to make existentialism known through contemporary literature.
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Simone de Beauvoir was considered as a feminist and social theorist and an existentialist philosopher whose works influenced and inspired a generation of women. Her novel The Second Sex which was published in 1949 inspired the women’s liberation movement. She also won the Goncourt Prize in 1954 with Les Mandarins. Her unquestionable talent made her a writer deserving her place in French literature.
She died at the age of 78, and she died one day before the sixth anniversary of the death of her companion, Jean-Paul Sartre, who died on April 15, 1980.
Best Simone de Beauvoir Quotations
The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.
Simone de Beauvoir
One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.
Simone de Beauvoir
Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.
Simone de Beauvoir
Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
Simone de Beauvoir
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone de Beauvoir
Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.
Simone de Beauvoir
Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male’s superiority.
Simone de Beauvoir
The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them.
Simone de Beauvoir
This has always been a man’s world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.
Simone de Beauvoir
To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.
Simone de Beauvoir
To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.
Simone de Beauvoir
What is an adult? A child blown up by age.
Simone de Beauvoir
When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.
Simone de Beauvoir
Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen.
Simone de Beauvoir
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.
Simone De Beauvoir
The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.
Simone de Beauvoir
All the idols made by man, however terrifying they may be, are in point of fact subordinate to him, and that is why he will always have it in his power to destroy them.
Simone de Beauvoir
In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.
Simone de Beauvoir
All oppression creates a state of war.
Simone de Beauvoir
Art is an attempt to integrate evil.
Simone de Beauvoir
Buying is a profound pleasure.
Simone de Beauvoir
Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.
Simone de Beauvoir
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.
Simone de Beauvoir
I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
Simone de Beauvoir
In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.
Simone de Beauvoir
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
Simone de Beauvoir
Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female – whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.
Simone de Beauvoir
No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.
Simone de Beauvoir
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth – and truth rewarded me.
Simone de Beauvoir