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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
Life
Surpassing
Perpetuating
Occupied
Maintain
Inspire
Dying
Living
Doe
More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir
Dwelling-place and food are useful for life but give it no significance: the immediate goals of the housekeeper are only means, not true ends.
Simone de Beauvoir
Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.
Simone de Beauvoir
Love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity.
Simone de Beauvoir
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde.
Simone de Beauvoir
A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into?
Simone de Beauvoir
The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it.
Simone de Beauvoir
Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.
Simone de Beauvoir
All the idols made by man, however terrifying they may be, are in point of fact subordinate to him, and that is why he will always have it in his power to destroy them.
Simone de Beauvoir
--There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time. --But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.
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
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
To be feminist doesn't mean simply to do nothing, to reduce yourself to total impotence under the pretext of refusing masculine values. There is a problematic, a very difficult dialectic between accepting power and refusing it, accepting certain masculine values, and wanting to transform them. I think it's worth a try.
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
To refuse everything, to say, even when there is something which really should be done, Ah, that's no longer feminist, is a pessimistic, even masochistic tendency in women, the result of having been habituated to inertia, to pessimism.
Simone de Beauvoir
Every time a man dies, a child dies too, and an adolescent and a young man as well everyone weeps for the one who was dear to him.
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
I think that Freud understood absolutely nothing about women - as he himself said.
Simone de Beauvoir
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
Simone de Beauvoir
