Simone de Beauvoir Biography Quotes 30 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was born in Paris on January 9, 1908, into a family that combined faded aristocratic pretensions with a strong Catholic upbringing. Her father, Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir, cultivated a love of literature and theater, while her mother, Francoise (nee Brasseur), was deeply religious. The family's finances declined after World War I, and the loss of security sharpened the young Simone's determination to pursue a life of the mind. She excelled at school, moving from convent education to advanced study in philosophy at the Sorbonne. There she prepared for the demanding national competitive examination, the agregation, joining a cohort that included Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Paul Nizan. In 1929 she placed near the top of the philosophy agregation, becoming one of the youngest to achieve this distinction.

Formation of a Philosophical Partnership
Her meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1929 inaugurated one of the most consequential intellectual partnerships of the twentieth century. They forged a lifelong pact that separated what they called their "essential" bond from other "contingent" attachments, rejecting marriage and conventional domesticity to protect their work and freedom. The pact enabled a steady exchange of ideas that shaped existentialism and left a deep imprint on postwar European culture. While each remained fiercely independent, they influenced one another's projects and opened their thinking to a circle that included Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron, and, later, figures from literature and politics who contributed to their journal Les Temps Modernes.

Teaching and Wartime Experience
In the early 1930s de Beauvoir taught philosophy at lycees in Marseille, Rouen, and Paris, honing a style that combined precision with moral urgency. The German occupation of France in World War II tested her generation's ethics. She remained in Paris, writing and reflecting on responsibility under conditions of coercion. Although not a frontline resister, she participated in a milieu of debate and clandestine exchange that fueled her first novels. In 1943 she was removed from her teaching post by Vichy authorities after accusations linked to her relationships with students; she did not return to teaching after the Liberation, concentrating instead on writing and editing.

Novels, Essays, and the Public Intellectual
De Beauvoir emerged as a major writer during the war and Liberation. She published She Came to Stay (L'Invitee, 1943), a novel probing freedom, jealousy, and bad faith; The Blood of Others (Le Sang des autres, 1945), which wrestled with complicity and commitment; and later The Mandarins (1954), a sweeping portrait of the postwar French intelligentsia that won the Prix Goncourt. Alongside fiction she developed a philosophical voice in Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944) and The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), insisting that freedom acquires meaning only through concrete engagement with others. With Sartre and colleagues, she co-founded Les Temps Modernes in 1945, a venue where literature, philosophy, and politics converged. She traveled to the United States in 1947, meeting writers such as Richard Wright, whose transatlantic perspective deepened her understanding of race, democracy, and modernity.

The Second Sex and Feminist Thought
Her most influential work, The Second Sex (Le Deuxieme Sexe, 1949), fused phenomenology, history, biology, literature, and ethnography to interrogate the making of woman as "Other". Its famous claim, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman", captured the socially constructed dimensions of gender. The book was hailed and condemned in equal measure, placed on the Vatican's Index of Forbidden Books, and became a foundation for second-wave feminism. De Beauvoir described how myth, education, and labor regimes produced dependence, and she defended women's economic and reproductive autonomy as preconditions for freedom. Across subsequent decades she elaborated these insights in essays and interviews, influencing activists and thinkers worldwide.

Memoirs and Moral Testimony
De Beauvoir's autobiographical cycle constitutes a major contribution to twentieth-century letters. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958) charted her break from piety to vocation; The Prime of Life (1960) and Force of Circumstance (1963) traced the evolution of her commitments through war and decolonization; A Very Easy Death (1964) offered an unflinching account of her mother's final illness; and All Said and Done (1972) gathered late reflections. She also published America Day by Day (1948), The Coming of Age (1970), and The Woman Destroyed (1967), the last exploring the fractures of identity and love. These works reveal a writer attentive to the ethical texture of daily life as much as to grand philosophical claims.

Personal Relations and Collaborative Milieus
De Beauvoir's life unfolded within a network of intense relationships. With Sartre she sustained a dialogue that generated books, lectures, and editorial projects. She befriended and corresponded with writers such as Richard Wright, and she maintained intimate ties beyond her "essential" bond with Sartre. Her relationship with the American novelist Nelson Algren in the late 1940s and early 1950s left traces in her fiction and a substantial body of letters. In the 1950s she shared her life for a time with the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, whose later work on memory and history resonated with her concerns. Earlier associations with former students, including Olga Kosakiewicz and Bianca Lamblin (born Bianca Bienenfeld), were later subjects of debate and self-scrutiny in accounts that revisited the power dynamics of the time. Her sister, Helene de Beauvoir, a painter, remained an enduring presence and interlocutor.

Political Engagement and Activism
De Beauvoir treated politics as an ethical demand. She opposed colonialism and supported Algerian independence, signing public statements that defended the right to civil disobedience during the Algerian War. In the 1970s she helped galvanize the women's movement in France, joining with the lawyer Gisele Halimi to support "Choisir", an organization dedicated to reproductive rights, and signing the 1971 Manifesto of the 343, in which women publicly declared they had undergone illegal abortions. She used her platform in Les Temps Modernes and in public forums to connect existential freedom with collective struggles against oppression.

Later Years and Legacy
After Sartre's death in 1980, de Beauvoir published Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (1981), a frank chronicle of his final years that also reflected on aging, partnership, and mortality. She continued to write, lecture, and mentor younger feminists, ensuring that debates about work, sexuality, and equality remained central to public life. Simone de Beauvoir died in Paris on April 14, 1986, and was buried beside Sartre in Montparnasse Cemetery, a site that symbolizes their intertwined lives.

Her legacy spans literature, philosophy, and activism. She reframed freedom as a situated practice, showed how gender is produced through institutions and myths, and exemplified the role of the engaged intellectual. The Second Sex remains a touchstone for scholarship and movements across continents, while her novels and memoirs continue to attract readers for their clarity, narrative power, and moral seriousness. Through dialogue with contemporaries such as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Wright, Algren, Lanzmann, and Halimi, she fashioned an oeuvre that links the private and the political, insisting that the measure of thought is its capacity to illuminate and transform lived experience.

Our collection contains 30 quotes who is written by Simone, under the main topics: Truth - Justice - Love - Meaning of Life - Writing.

Other people realated to Simone: Søren Kierkegaard (Philosopher), Simone Weil (Philosopher), Judith Butler (Philosopher), Marilyn French (Author), Betty Friedan (Activist), Alberto Giacometti (Sculptor), Nelson Algren (Novelist), Juliet Mitchell (Psychologist), Alice S. Rossi (Sociologist), Boris Vian (Writer)