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To give space when what one most yearns for is closeness, that is both the great test and great tragedy of love.
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
Tests
Tragedy
Space
Give
Giving
Great
Yearns
Love
Closeness
Test
More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir
The emancipation of women must be the work of women themselves, independent of the class struggle.
Simone de Beauvoir
Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately.
Simone de Beauvoir
It's so easy to be mistaken about the future. Sometimes there are avant-gardes which believe themselves to be the avant-garde and which later find themselves to be absolutely dated.
Simone de Beauvoir
They [Americans] want to believe that Good and Evil can be defined in precise categories, that Good is already, or will be easily achieved. ... if this optimism appears too superficial, they will try to create a kind of anti-God: the U.S.S.R. That is Evil, and it only needs to be annihilated to re-establish the reign of Good.
Simone de Beauvoir
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
What would Prince Charming have for occupation if he had not to awaken the Sleeping beauty?
Simone de Beauvoir
It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.
Simone de Beauvoir
Retirement revives the sorrow of parting, the feeling of abandonment, solitude and uselessness that is caused by the loss of some beloved person.
Simone de Beauvoir
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
I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.
Simone de Beauvoir
Why does one exist? That's not my problem. One does exist. The thing to do is to take no notice but go at it on the run and to keep on going right on until you die.
Simone de Beauvoir
Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.
Simone de Beauvoir
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other.
Simone de Beauvoir
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
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
The innumerable conflicts that set men and women against one another come from the fact that neither is prepared to assume all the consequences of this situation which the one has offered and the other accepted.
Simone de Beauvoir
The individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of himself.
Simone de Beauvoir
I have never read a really good novel written by a man where women are portrayed as they truly are. They can be portrayed externally very well - Stendhal's Madame de Renal, for example - but only as seen from the outside.
Simone de Beauvoir
Christianity gave eroticism its savor of sin and legend when it endowed the human female with a soul.
Simone de Beauvoir
