He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!

— Simone de Beauvoir

...her wings are cut, and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.

— Simone de Beauvoir

How could van Gogh have been born woman? A woman would not have been sent on mission to Boring, she would not have felt men's misery as her own crime, she would not have sought redemption; so she would never have painted van Gogh's sunflowers. And this without taking into account that the painter's kind of life - the solitude in Axles, going to cafés, whorehouses, everything that feed into van Gogh's art by feeding his sensibility - would have been prohibited to her. A woman could have never become Kafka: in her doubts and anxieties, she would never have recognized the anguish of Man driven from paradise.

— Simone de Beauvoir

How could women ever have had genius when all possibility of accomplishing a work of genius - or just a work - was refused them?

— Simone de Beauvoir

I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.

— Simone de Beauvoir

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finite. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.

— Simone de Beauvoir

I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself

— Simone de Beauvoir

I didn't know the first thing about the people around me, but that didn't matter: I was in a new world; and I had the feelings that at last I had put my finger on the secret of freedom.

— Simone de Beauvoir

If I were to share Jacques' existence I would find it hard to hold my own against him, for already I found his nihilism contagious.

— Simone de Beauvoir

If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression.

— Simone de Beauvoir