Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.

If you live life, then you become what are.

Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.

Transcendence constitutes selfhood.

The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.

Life, is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.

Never think you can separate who you are from what you're doing.

Before you can do something, you must first be something.

You yourselves are the Being you are seeking.

When you know your not going to die, you have to ask yourself... What's the highest and best use for myself.

At first, there is something you expect of life. Later, there is what life expects of you. By the time you realize these are the same, it can be too late for expectations. What we are being, not what we are to be. They are the same thing.

By my existence I am nothing more than an empty place, an outline,that is reserved within being in general. Given with it, though, is the duty to fill in this empty place. That is my life.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

I think and that is all that I am.

Every character is asking: 'What's my place? Why am I here? I don't want the answer to be 'Just because.' You find your own purpose. Each finds the reason to be here and how to contribute.

Ask me not what I have, but what I am.

I'm always aware that there are, broadly speaking, two different ways to act: there is acting, and then there's being, and I'm always more interested in that.

We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

I don't have dreams. How can I say it? I myself am a dream.

But once you become active in something, something happens to you. You get excited and suddenly you realize you count.

The notion of looking on at life has always been hateful to me. What am I if I am not a participant? In order to be, I must participate.

How could I have been anyone other than me?

How could there be any question of acquiring or possessing, when the one thing needful for a man is to become - to be at last, and to die in the fullness of his being.

When you forget everything, there only remains yourself - and that is not enough.

Do not wish to be anything but what you are, and try to be that perfectly.