Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

What is our life? A play of passion. Our mirth the music of division. Our mother's wombs the tyring houses be, Where we are drest for this short Comedy.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

We're all travelers in this world. From the sweet grass to the packing house. Birth 'til death. We travel between the eternities.

You are the Universe expressing itself as a human for a little while.

Already, it is later than you think for your earthly life at best, is only a blink of an eye between two eternities.

And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life.

The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.

It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.

I grow aware of various forms of man and of myself. I am form and I am formless, I am life and I am matter, mortal and immortal. I am one and many -- myself and humanity in flux.

The world we are born into-this complicated, difficult, hauntingly touching world-is the one whole thing. It is the world we awaken in, and awaken to.

Every person who has ever lived has lived an unbroken succession of unique occasions.

Wherever comes man comes tragedy and comedy also.

What is life? It departs covertly. Like a thief Death took him.

Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.

We’re all tourists, sort of. Life is tourism, sort of. As far as I’m concerned, the dinosaurs still hold the lease on this godforsaken rock.

This was what it meant to be human, to know that time moved and all things changed.

Trying to figure things out was my gig. Without the human condition, there's no struggle, no pain and that means no laughter.

It is not in our hands to prevent our birth; but we can correct this mistake - for in some cases it is a mistake.

I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched. On the river the heat mirages danced with each other and then they danced through each other and then they joined hands and danced around each other. Eventually the water joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river.

[H]appy or miserable, life is the only blessing which man possesses[.

I mean, after all, you have to consider we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's sort of a bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?

A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.

A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing.

The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.