10 Pieces of Philosophical Wisdom From Simone de Beauvoir

Recently, I read French feminist, intellectual, and existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. I was blown away. Here are a few of my favorite quotes; I hope you find them as thought-provoking as I did.

1. “No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.”
2. “I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth — and truth rewarded me.”
3. “One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others.”
4. “That’s what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.”
5. “When she does not find love, she may find poetry. Because she does not act, she observes, she feels, she records; a color, a smile awakens profound echoes within her; her destiny is outside her, scattered in cities already built, on the faces of men already marked by life, she makes contact, she relishes with passion and yet in a manner more detached, more free, than that of a young man. Being poorly integrated in the universe of humanity and hardly able to adapt herself therein, she, like the child, is able to see it objectively; instead of being interested solely in her grasp on things, she looks for their significance; she catches their special outlines, their unexpected metamorphoses. She rarely feels a bold creativeness, and usually she lacks the technique of self-expression; but in her conversation, her letters, her literary essays, her sketches, she manifests an original sensitivity. The young girl throws herself into things with ardor, because she is not yet deprived of her transcendence; and the fact that she accomplishes nothing, that she is nothing, will make her impulses only the more passionate. Empty and unlimited, she seeks from within her nothingness to attain All.”
6. “If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.”
7. “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 absolute truth.”
8. “She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.”
9. “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.”
10. “On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself — on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.”