Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Simone de Beauvoir
Age: 78 †
Born: 1908
Born: January 9
Died: 1986
Died: April 14
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Political Activist
Political Philosopher
Paris
France
Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Castor
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Means
Indignation
Others
Nurse
Women
Attributes
Mean
Kindness
Long
Friendship
Love
Compassion
Life
Value
Values

More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

Image
A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or castle it stands for permanence and separation from the world.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
... to adapt one's outlook to another person's salvation is the surest and quickest way of losing him.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
there is a poetry in making preserves the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
The time that one gains cannot be accumulated in a storehouse it is contradictory to want to save up existence, which, the fact is, exists only by being spent and there is a good case for showing that airplanes, machines, the telephone, and the radio do not make men of today happier than those of former times.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
…but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
Buying is profound pleasure.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
You can't address yourself to women by speaking a language which no average woman will understand. In my opinion, it's wrong.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
--There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time. --But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
The state of emotional intoxication allows one to grasp existence in one's self and in the other, as both subjectivity and passivity. The two partners merge in this ambiguous unity each one is freed of his own presence and achieves immediate communication with the other.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
They [Americans] want to believe that Good and Evil can be defined in precise categories, that Good is already, or will be easily achieved. ... if this optimism appears too superficial, they will try to create a kind of anti-God: the U.S.S.R. That is Evil, and it only needs to be annihilated to re-establish the reign of Good.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
If the unconscious must express itself it will do so through the work that you do consciously or subconsciously, with words, with what you have to say.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
But I must admit I didn´t like that idea do the same thing as everyone else. Eating to live, living to eat - that had been the nightmare of my adolescence. If it meant going back to that, if would be just as well to turn on the gas at once. But I suppose everyone thinks of things like that: let´s turn on the gas at once. And you don´t turn it on.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
If you haven't been happy very young, you can still be happy later on, but it's much harder. You need more luck.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
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
Image
Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.
Simone de Beauvoir