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Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Simone de Beauvoir
Age: 78 †
Born: 1908
Born: January 9
Died: 1986
Died: April 14
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Political Activist
Political Philosopher
Paris
France
Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Castor
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Living
Doe
Life
Surpassing
Perpetuating
Occupied
Maintain
Inspire
Dying
More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir
Society turns away from the aged worker as though he belonged to another species. That is why the whole question is buried in a conspiracy of silence. Old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization.
Simone de Beauvoir
It must be said in addition that the men with the most scrupulous respect for embryonic life are also those who are most zealous when it comes to condemning adults to death in war.
Simone de Beauvoir
Retirement revives the sorrow of parting, the feeling of abandonment, solitude and uselessness that is caused by the loss of some beloved person.
Simone de Beauvoir
That is what chills your spine when you read an account of a suicide: not the frail corpse hanging from the window bars but what happened inside that heart immediately before.
Simone de Beauvoir
Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word. Machines won't change human nature.
Simone de Beauvoir
Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.
Simone de Beauvoir
Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.
Simone de Beauvoir
That's what I consider true generosity. You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.
Simone de Beauvoir
I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.
Simone de Beauvoir
However gifted an individual is at the outset, if his or her talents cannot be developed because of his or her social condition, because of the surrounding circumstances, these talents will be still-born.
Simone de Beauvoir
The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.
Simone de Beauvoir
There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.
Simone de Beauvoir
There are so many problems. Women can go to work on these as well without giving up their feminism.
Simone de Beauvoir
To show your true ability is always, in a sense, to surpass the limits of your ability, to go a little beyond them: to dare, to seek, to invent it is at such a moment that new talents are revealed, discovered, and realized
Simone de Beauvoir
There are topics which are common to men and women. I think that if a woman speaks of oppression, of misery, she will speak of it in exactly the same way as a man. But if she speaks of her own personal problems as a woman, she will obviously speak in another way.
Simone de Beauvoir
it is so difficult not to become vain about one's own good luck.
Simone de Beauvoir
It is not mere chance that makes families speak of a child who is 'extraordinary for his age' and also of an old man who is 'extraordinary for his age' the extraordinariness lies in their behaving like human beings when they are either not yet or no longer men.
Simone de Beauvoir
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
Let women be provided with living strength of their own.
Simone de Beauvoir
To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.
Simone de Beauvoir
