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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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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
Truth
Encourage
Long
Absolutes
Would
Absolute
Think
Seeking
Thinking
Exactly
Training
Preoccupation
Conversation
Polite
Understand
Criticize

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When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.
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At the moment of their emancipation, women have a need to write their own histories.
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Writing is a trade ... which is learned by writing.
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To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.
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Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one being active and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one.
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It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.
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... to adapt one's outlook to another person's salvation is the surest and quickest way of losing him.
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Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you've lost that, you've lost everything.
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A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself.
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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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No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.
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Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately.
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Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.
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For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay.
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Habit has a kind of poetry.
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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.
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there is a poetry in making preserves the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.
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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.
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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.
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