Life & Wisdom Quote by Simone de Beauvoir

A cold sentence with a scalpel edge: de Beauvoir isn’t lamenting that people can be selfish; she’s indicting a system that turns care into a transaction and then calls it “common sense.” The line works because it sounds like a description of reality, not an argument. No exclamation points, no moral pleading. Just the quiet violence of an if-then clause: you matter if you pay.

The intent is political, but it’s also existential. De Beauvoir spent her career tracing how “the individual” is made, constrained, and ranked by social forces that pretend to be natural. Here she collapses the sentimental idea of society-as-family into something closer to a balance sheet. “Cares for” is doing heavy lifting: it can mean protection, concern, even love. She suggests those softer meanings are conditional, rationed out to those who can be converted into output - labor, status, reproductive value, respectability, cultural capital.

The subtext is feminist without needing to announce itself. In mid-century France, the “profitable” person is implicitly male, employed, public; the “unprofitable” are those rendered dependent or disposable: women confined to domestic work, the elderly, the sick, the colonized, anyone whose contribution can’t be neatly counted. De Beauvoir’s larger project in The Second Sex exposes precisely this trick: society treats certain lives as background infrastructure, then denies them full personhood because they don’t register as profit.

Context matters: postwar reconstruction, industrial capitalism, and bureaucratic modernity all intensified the pressure to justify existence through productivity. De Beauvoir’s line still stings because it names the uncomfortable truth behind today’s “hustle” pieties and austerity logics: compassion is often budgeted, not felt.