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A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.

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
Writing
Diversity
Never
Notion
Would
Justice
Situation
Men
Culture
Human
Peculiar
Humans
Male
Book
Males

More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

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Love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity.
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The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation.
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There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.
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A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.
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People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls.
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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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To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.
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I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
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The time that one gains cannot be accumulated in a storehouse it is contradictory to want to save up existence, which, the fact is, exists only by being spent and there is a good case for showing that airplanes, machines, the telephone, and the radio do not make men of today happier than those of former times.
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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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Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.
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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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In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.
Simone de Beauvoir
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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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Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
Simone de Beauvoir
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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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Ce n'est gue' re que dans les asiles que les coquettes gardent avec ente tement une foi entie' re en des regards absents normalement, elles re clament des te moins. Women fond of dress are hardly ever entirely satisfied not to be seen, except among the insane usually they want witnesses.
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What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. But we have seen that it is one of the lies of the serious mind to attempt to give the word useful an absolute meaning nothing is useful if it is not useful to man nothing is useful to man if the latter is not in a position to define his own ends and values, if he is not free.
Simone de Beauvoir
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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