Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

One is not born a woman - one becomes one.

One is not born a genius one becomes a genius.

The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another.

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

Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear without having so much as a smile for the young future.

In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome stubbornness is stupid.

I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where i slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat.

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.