Quote

To show your true ability is always, in a sense, to surpass the limits of your ability, to go a little beyond them: to dare, to seek, to invent it is at such a moment that new talents are revealed, discovered, and realized

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
Always
Show
Dare
Moment
Achievement
Sense
Discovery
Surpass
Moments
Seek
Invent
Shows
Limits
Revealed
True
Beyond
Talents
Littles
Talent
Discovered
Little
Ability
Realized

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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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It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.
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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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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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It's frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself. It seems unfair. You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do --or don't do.
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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.
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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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The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change.
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I think that Freud understood absolutely nothing about women - as he himself said.
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One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.
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The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or castle it stands for permanence and separation from the world.
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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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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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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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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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To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.
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To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.
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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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She offered her mouth to him, as if enchanted. A Persian princess, a little Indian, a fox, a morning glory, a lovely wisteria--it always pleased them when you told them they looked like something, like something else.
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Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.
Simone de Beauvoir