Simone de Beauvoir

I am too intelligent, too demanding, too resourceful for anyone to be able to satisfy me sensibly.

Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.

Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.

To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.

The great advantage of living in a pigsty is that the standards are so low, nothing can really disappoint you.

There is no way a man can understand a woman, unless he is a woman.

A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drowned, he said, for he will be going out on a day when he should not. But we do not choose the day for the sea. She chooses it for us.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

I wish that every human life might be an ascension toward a better and better future.

She was not born to be a wife, nor a mother, nor anything but herself.

The most marvelous thing about writing is that it allows you to be alone with your thoughts, without being lonely.

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth was undoubtedly the highest mistress I ever served.

The word 'love' has by now been so debased and perverted that it has become almost impossible to use it without a sense of shame.

Man is defined as a being that has to create himself.

It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our existence that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting.

The greatest scandal of the world is the one we are all guilty of: the fact that we are born.

If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.

The point is not for a woman to be like a man, but to be a woman, to be an individual with her own identity and her own values.

It is by no means an accident that man is a male.