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

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

More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

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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.
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A man of the right doesn't write in the same way as a man of the left, you can see that right away, or a woman of the right or a woman of the left.
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Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, I don't want to be just another blade of grass.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.
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I admire Freud a great deal as a person and thinker. Despite everything, I find his work very, very rich, but I think that for women he has been absolutely disastrous. And even more so, everyone who came after him.
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Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.
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all success cloaks a surrender
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Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.
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The Sahara was a spectacle as alive as the sea. The tints of the dunes changed according to the time of day and the angle of the light: golden as apricots from far off, when we drove close to them they turned to freshly made butter behind us they grew pink from sand to rock, the materials of which the desert was made varied as much as its tints.
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Jealousy is not contemptible, real love has a beak and claws.
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A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.
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Women aren't more easily swayed by fascism than men, but I believe that their situation makes them in effect more slavish than men.
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On ne na|t pas femme: on le devient. One is not born a woman: one becomes a woman.
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I'm not against mothers. I am against the ideology which expects every woman to have children, and I'm against the circumstances under which mothers have to have their children.
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If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through the eternal feminine, and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman?
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I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
Simone de Beauvoir