Simone de Beauvoir — "The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect …"
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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More from Simone de Beauvoir
"A woman's greatest achievement is to be a mother."
"I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself."
"To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to choose what you want to do."
"I was born to be happy."
"The present is not a potential past; it is the moment of choice and action."
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.