Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

I hate to think life is just facts and laws.

I'm a Nietzschean scholar. I've read an immense amount about nihilism and existentialism.

I don't know the meaning of life. I don't know why we are here. I think life is full of anxieties and fears and tears. It has a lot of grief in it, and it can be very grim. And I do not want to be the one who tries to tell somebody else what life is all about. To me it's a complete mystery.

life is a tragic mystery. We are pierced and driven by laws we only half understand, we find that the lesson we learn again and again is that of accepting heroic helplessness.

The great question of philosophy remains: If life is meaningless, what can be done about alphabet soup?

Life belongs to man, but the meaning of life is beyond him.

Those who die, merely suffering the woes of life like cats and dogs, are they men?

Will our life not be a tunnel between two vague clarities? Or will it not be a clarity between two dark triangles?

Every kid goes to school full of questions about meaning. You know, 'What's my place in the universe? What does it mean to be a human being? What are human beings?' Existing courses cannot help you answer those questions. They can't even help you ask them.

It is good a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.

Life is such a tragicomedy.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.

To be human is to keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence, hollering, 'What's it for?'

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

When I was young I read 'L'Etranger' by Camus, and it made me aware of the strangeness of life.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

I think Poe had a mission to tell us what it's all about. To answer some of the great questions of life.

Initially, I studied philosophy, because it claimed to give you answers to the meaning of existence, but it didn't: It was basically a semantics game.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

If you don't ponder the end of the world on a regular basis, I don't think you're really human.

How do we describe the fact of human existence? At a certain point, perhaps, style fails us. Language, even and in particular at its most evocative, becomes less of an aid and more of a difficulty.