Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.

Life is a question without a standard answer.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

My personal philosophy is, you can be sure of nothing.

The world's a mean place. It's unfair, then it's fair. It's hateful, then it's loving. It's a very peculiar place on philosophical and metaphysical and religious levels.

I don't know how one should live - but I know that one should live.

Meaning is man-created. And because you constantly look for meaning, you start to feel meaninglessness.

Cause nothing really is and everything really isn’t.

L'homme est condamne a' e" tre libre. Man is condemned to be free.

The world's a puzzle; no need to make sense out of it." - Socrates

Man is abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no aim but what he sets himself.

Throughout the entire history of philosophy, philosophers have sought to discover what man is - or what human nature is. But Sartre believed that man has no such eternal nature to fall back on. It is therefore useless to search for the meaning of life in general. We are condemned to improvise. We are like actors dragged onto the stage without having learned our lines, with no script and no prompter to whisper stage directions to us. We must decide for ourselves how to live.

The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen.

The concept of absurdity is something I'm attracted to.

There's nothing more ironic or contradictory than life itself.

I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

I'm using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human - it turns out that it's a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.

Life is extremely complicated.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

The main questions of everyday life are too enormous to answer in any definitive sense.

Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous.

It is only in the light of the inescapable fact of death that a person can adequately engage and enter upon the mysterious fact of life.

It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.