Simone de Beauvoir — "The greatest crime is to be bored."
The greatest crime is to be bored.
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More from Simone de Beauvoir
"There is an odd kind of pleasure in not being able to understand anything, in being completely at sea."
"To be free is to be responsible."
"I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth was undoubtedly at the bottom of my search for an autonomous existence."
"The greatest challenge in life is to find your own path."
"The greatest adventure is to live your life as if it were a work of art."
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.