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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?

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
Woman
Explain
Provisionally
Also
Eternity
Women
Female
Functioning
Enough
Exist
Nevertheless
Must
Eternal
Decline
Question
Feminine
Face
Define
Faces
Admit

More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

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To refuse everything, to say, even when there is something which really should be done, Ah, that's no longer feminist, is a pessimistic, even masochistic tendency in women, the result of having been habituated to inertia, to pessimism.
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It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
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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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One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.
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it is so difficult not to become vain about one's own good luck.
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A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.
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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
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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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If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it a discussion
Simone de Beauvoir
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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
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I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.
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Cooking is revolution and creation.
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I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.
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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Each person has his or her own very particular history and after all, the unconscious is the most secret part of ourselves.
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Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient.
Simone de Beauvoir
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At the moment of their emancipation, women have a need to write their own histories.
Simone de Beauvoir