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Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.

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
Men
Though
Heavily
World
Woman
Shaped
Two
Dependent
Change
Equality
Today
Slave
Even
Sex
Always
Beginning
Handicapped
Never
Situation
Sexes

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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.
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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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That's what I consider true generosity. You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.
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Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.
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My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.
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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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Women's mutual understanding comes from the fact that they identify themselves with each other but for the same reason each is against the others.
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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.
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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.
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Si l'on vit assez longtemps, on voit que toute victoire se change un jour en de faite. If you live long enough, you'll find that every victory turns into a defeat.
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She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.
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My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together.
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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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From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.
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A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself.
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Art is an attempt to integrate evil.
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The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams.
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I think that The Second Sex will seem an old, dated book, after a while. But nonetheless, a book which will have made its contribution. At least, I hope so.
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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.
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But women do not say 'We', except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration men say 'women', and women use the same word in referring to themselves.
Simone de Beauvoir