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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

More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

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You have to start from where you are today and from what can be done.
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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.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Feminism is one way of attacking society as it now exists.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Buying is a profound pleasure.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise. (p. 248)
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When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.
Simone de Beauvoir
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One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.
Simone de Beauvoir
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To be feminist doesn't mean simply to do nothing, to reduce yourself to total impotence under the pretext of refusing masculine values. There is a problematic, a very difficult dialectic between accepting power and refusing it, accepting certain masculine values, and wanting to transform them. I think it's worth a try.
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You have never had any confidence in him. And if he has no confidence in himself it is because he sees himself through your eyes.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.
Simone de Beauvoir
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I think that Freud understood absolutely nothing about women - as he himself said.
Simone de Beauvoir
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At bottom, antipsychiatry is still psychiatry. And it doesn't really address itself to women's problems.
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
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There are moments when you have to write certain things and you don't have to think of your sex. If you are writing about the population of the thirteenth district in Paris, even if you are writing on the women in the thirteenth district, there's no need to consider your sex.
Simone de Beauvoir
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It is impossible to do anything for anyone.
Simone de Beauvoir
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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
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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.
Simone de Beauvoir
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As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.
Simone de Beauvoir
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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.
Simone de Beauvoir
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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.
Simone de Beauvoir