Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.
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Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.
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People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls.
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I could see no reason for being sad. It´s just that it makes me unhappy not to feel happy.
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It's frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself. It seems unfair. You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do --or don't do.
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Writing ... is a profession that can only be learned by writing.
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The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one.
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The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.
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Anyway I know only too well that all life is nothing but a brief reprieve from death.
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Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.
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On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself--on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.
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Feminism is a revolutionary movement which is different from the class struggle movement, the proletarian movement, but which is a movement which must be leftist. By that I mean at the extreme left, a movement working to overthrow the whole society.
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She offered her mouth to him, as if enchanted. A Persian princess, a little Indian, a fox, a morning glory, a lovely wisteria--it always pleased them when you told them they looked like something, like something else.
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The father's life is surrounded by mysterious prestige: the hours he spends in the home, the room where he works, the objects around him, his occupations, his habits, have a sacred character. It is he who feeds the family, is the one in charge and the head. Usually he works outside the home, and it is through him that the household communicates with the rest of the world: he is the embodiment of this adventurous, immense, difficult, and marvelous world; he is transcendence, he is God.
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Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies.
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A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong.
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To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.
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Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.
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Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.
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If you are truly on the left, if you reject ideas of power and hierarchy, what you want is equality. Otherwise, it won't work at all.
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One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.
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I believe that we must use language. If it is used in a feminist perspective, with a feminist sensibility, language will find itself changed in a feminist manner. It will nonetheless be the language. You can't not use this universal instrument; you can't create an artificial language, in my opinion. But naturally, each writer must use it in his/her own way.
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I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.
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Retirement revives the sorrow of parting, the feeling of abandonment, solitude and uselessness that is caused by the loss of some beloved person.
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Feminism is one way of attacking society as it now exists.
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The innumerable conflicts that set men and women against one another come from the fact that neither is prepared to assume all the consequences of this situation which the one has offered and the other accepted.
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He formed his sentences hesitantly and then threw them at me with such force that I felt as if I were receiving a present each time
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Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness.
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I think that Freud understood absolutely nothing about women - as he himself said.
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The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.
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