Simone de Beauvoir World Quotations

This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.

Many things would be changed for Americans if they would only admit that there is ill-luck in this world and that misfortune is not a priori a crime.

The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.

--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.

There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.

Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, "I don't want to be just another blade of grass.

I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing.

Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself.

Let women be provided with living strength of their own. Let them have the means to attack the world and wrest from it their own subsistence, and their dependence will be abolished -- that of man also.

It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.

The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project

One can hardly tell women that washing up saucepans is their divine mission, [so] they are told that bringing up children is their divine mission. But the way things are in the world, bringing up children has a great deal in common with washing up saucepans.

The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.