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

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At bottom, antipsychiatry is still psychiatry. And it doesn't really address itself to women's problems.
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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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You can't address yourself to women by speaking a language which no average woman will understand. In my opinion, it's wrong.
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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.
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Work almost always has a double aspect: it is a bondage, a wearisome drudgery but it is also a source of interest, a steadying element, a factor that helps to integrate the worker with society. Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
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When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies, then the division of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.
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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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Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.
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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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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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Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.
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To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.
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The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change.
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She was trying to get rid of a religious hangover.
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She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.
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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.
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Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.
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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.
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It's important that you think of your relationship with the world and the way you can express that world and that you not be stopped if it scandalizes or embarrasses but you must not look for scandal or for the avant-garde as a thing in itself.
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Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.
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