Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution -- not a social or a political revolution -- only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.
Simone de Beauvoir
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Truth
Revolution
Back
Wisdom
Would
Beauty
Men
Moral
Knowledge
Preferred
Lost
Usefulness
Social
Mere
Political
Lead
More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir
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 himself.
Simone de Beauvoir
Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies.
Simone de Beauvoir
Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.
Simone de Beauvoir
One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.
Simone de Beauvoir
It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.
Simone de Beauvoir
Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.
Simone de Beauvoir
It is impossible to do anything for anyone.
Simone de Beauvoir
Christian ideology has contributed no little to the oppression of woman.
Simone de Beauvoir
Art is an attempt to integrate evil.
Simone de Beauvoir
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
Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.
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
There are topics which are common to men and women. I think that if a woman speaks of oppression, of misery, she will speak of it in exactly the same way as a man. But if she speaks of her own personal problems as a woman, she will obviously speak in another way.
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
Harmony between two individuals is never granted-it has to be conquered indefinitely.
Simone de Beauvoir
Why does one exist? That's not my problem. One does exist. The thing to do is to take no notice but go at it on the run and to keep on going right on until you die.
Simone de Beauvoir
I'm not against mothers. I am against the ideology which expects every woman to have children, and I'm against the circumstances under which mothers have to have their children.
Simone de Beauvoir
I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.
Simone de Beauvoir
Love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity.
Simone de Beauvoir
The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation.
Simone de Beauvoir