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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.
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
Future
Free
Given
Power
Anything
Able
Surpass
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Toward
Open
More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir
A man of the right doesn't write in the same way as a man of the left, you can see that right away, or a woman of the right or a woman of the left.
Simone de Beauvoir
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
However gifted an individual is at the outset, if his or her talents cannot be developed because of his or her social condition, because of the surrounding circumstances, these talents will be still-born.
Simone de Beauvoir
There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.
Simone de Beauvoir
I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.
Simone de Beauvoir
Virginia Woolf thought a lot about her own sex when she wrote. In the best sense of the word, her writing is very feminine, and by that I mean that women are supposed to be very sensitive to all the sensations of nature, much more so than men, much more contemplative. It's this quality that marks her best works.
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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
Anyway I know only too well that all life is nothing but a brief reprieve from death.
Simone de Beauvoir
--There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time. --But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.
Simone de Beauvoir
The state of emotional intoxication allows one to grasp existence in one's self and in the other, as both subjectivity and passivity. The two partners merge in this ambiguous unity each one is freed of his own presence and achieves immediate communication with the other.
Simone de Beauvoir
Habit has a kind of poetry.
Simone de Beauvoir
That's what I consider true generosity. You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.
Simone de Beauvoir
There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.
Simone de Beauvoir
Christian ideology has contributed no little to the oppression of woman.
Simone de Beauvoir
But I must admit I didn´t like that idea do the same thing as everyone else. Eating to live, living to eat - that had been the nightmare of my adolescence. If it meant going back to that, if would be just as well to turn on the gas at once. But I suppose everyone thinks of things like that: let´s turn on the gas at once. And you don´t turn it on.
Simone de Beauvoir
That is what chills your spine when you read an account of a suicide: not the frail corpse hanging from the window bars but what happened inside that heart immediately before.
Simone de Beauvoir
all success cloaks a surrender
Simone de Beauvoir
The emancipation of women must be the work of women themselves, independent of the class struggle.
Simone de Beauvoir
The arrogance of some Christians would close heaven to them if, to their misfortune, it existed.
Simone de Beauvoir
