Quote

It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.

Simone de Beauvoir

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Age
Preserves
Rather
Dimensions
Death
Whereas
Away
Aging
Doe
Absolutes
Contrasted
Giving
Absolute
Transforms
Way
Destiny
Parody
Time
Dying
Dimension

More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

Image
A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
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
Image
Cooking is revolution and creation.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
That a whole part of the middle class detests me... is utterly normal. I would be troubled if the contrary were true.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
If you try consciously to be avant-garde, it's a little dangerous, like the present state of modern painting, where dealers try to be avant-garde, and under this pretext, painters take some old scraps and call it avant-garde.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
You have never had any confidence in him. And if he has no confidence in himself it is because he sees himself through your eyes.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
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
Image
Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
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
Image
from one minute to the next the present is merely an honorary past. It must be filled unceasingly anew to dissemble the curse it carries within itself that is why Americans like speed, alcohol, thriller films and any sensational news: the demand for new things, and ever newer things, is feverish since nowhere will they rest.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
If the unconscious must express itself it will do so through the work that you do consciously or subconsciously, with words, with what you have to say.
Simone de Beauvoir