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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

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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
Seem
Question
Seems
Approached
Mind
Alter
Way
Granted
Things
Looked
Habit
Took

More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

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The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams.
Simone de Beauvoir
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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
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If women really did have complete equality with men, society would be completely overturned.
Simone de Beauvoir
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I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
Simone de Beauvoir
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It is impossible to do anything for anyone.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Anais Nin shows an occasional grace in writing, but her work is quite foreign to me, precisely because she wants so much to be feminine and not feminist. And then she is so gaga before so many men. She talks about men I know in France, men who were less than nothing, and she considers them kings, extraordinary people.
Simone de Beauvoir
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…but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.
Simone de Beauvoir
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There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.
Simone de Beauvoir
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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
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Old age is better for women than for men. First of all, they have less far to fall, since their lives are more mediocre than those of most men.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.
Simone de Beauvoir
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There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.
Simone de Beauvoir
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One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.
Simone de Beauvoir
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To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.
Simone de Beauvoir
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The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Harmony between two individuals is never granted-it has to be conquered indefinitely.
Simone de Beauvoir
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What would Prince Charming have for occupation if he had not to awaken the Sleeping beauty?
Simone de Beauvoir
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The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another.
Simone de Beauvoir
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The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project
Simone de Beauvoir
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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