Quote by Simone de Beauvoir: “One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others.”

Your own life gains meaning through genuine care for others. When you stop seeing other lives as valuable, something in your own life becomes hollow. This is not a sentimental idea — it is a hard claim that self-worth and other-regard are inseparable.

De Beauvoir wrote this in The Coming of Age, published in 1970, a searing examination of how Western societies treated the elderly. The book was part of her broader ethical project of understanding what it means to live well in relation to others, especially those the powerful tend to ignore.

French existentialist philosopher, writer, and feminist theorist whose 1949 work The Second Sex laid the groundwork for second-wave feminism by arguing that gender is a social construction. She was a lifelong intellectual partner of Jean-Paul Sartre.