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It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.
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
Live
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Reasons
More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir
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?
Simone de Beauvoir
... to adapt one's outlook to another person's salvation is the surest and quickest way of losing him.
Simone de Beauvoir
Virginia Woolf thought a lot about her own sex when she wrote. In the best sense of the word, her writing is very feminine, and by that I mean that women are supposed to be very sensitive to all the sensations of nature, much more so than men, much more contemplative. It's this quality that marks her best works.
Simone de Beauvoir
The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.
Simone de Beauvoir
My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together.
Simone de Beauvoir
As soon as a woman re- fuses to be perfectly happy doing housework eight hours a day, society has a tendency to want to do a lobotomy on her.
Simone de Beauvoir
The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution -- not a social or a political revolution -- only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.
Simone de Beauvoir
Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.
Simone de Beauvoir
Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.
Simone de Beauvoir
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.
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
I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.
Simone de Beauvoir
But I must admit I didn´t like that idea do the same thing as everyone else. Eating to live, living to eat - that had been the nightmare of my adolescence. If it meant going back to that, if would be just as well to turn on the gas at once. But I suppose everyone thinks of things like that: let´s turn on the gas at once. And you don´t turn it on.
Simone de Beauvoir
I think that The Second Sex will seem an old, dated book, after a while. But nonetheless, a book which will have made its contribution. At least, I hope so.
Simone de Beauvoir
On ne na|t pas femme: on le devient. One is not born a woman: one becomes a woman.
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
One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, I will always be here.
Simone de Beauvoir
To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.
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
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
