Simone de Beauvoir — "I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for trut…"
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth—and truth rewarded me.
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More from Simone de Beauvoir
"Old age is a caricature of our former self."
"The point is not for a woman to be like a man, but to be a woman, to be an individual with her own identity and her own values."
"The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project."
"The greatest scandal of the world is the one we are all guilty of: the fact that we are born."
"I have been as good as a man. I have been as bad as a man."
About Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)
French existentialist philosopher whose The Second Sex (1949) is the foundational text of modern feminist theory. Closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre (lifetime partner and existentialist co-founder) and Albert Camus (existentialist contemporary in Paris). For an intellectual contrast, see Camille Paglia, American cultural critic and Sexual Personae author — Paglia argues for biological-essentialist roots of gender that Beauvoir's social-construction view — 'one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman' — explicitly rejects. The two are the cleanest constructed-vs-essentialist poles in feminist theory.
The standard scholarly entry points to Simone de Beauvoir's work: Toril Moi (Duke, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor) — Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994); Margaret A. Simons (Southern Illinois University, Emerita) — Beauvoir and The Second Sex (1999); Kate Kirkpatrick (Oxford, Regent's Park College) — Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (2019). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Simone de Beauvoir.