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Old age is better for women than for men. First of all, they have less far to fall, since their lives are more mediocre than those of most men.

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
Firsts
Mediocre
First
Since
Men
Age
Less
Lives
Fall
Women
Better

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It is not mere chance that makes families speak of a child who is 'extraordinary for his age' and also of an old man who is 'extraordinary for his age' the extraordinariness lies in their behaving like human beings when they are either not yet or no longer men.
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Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.
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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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Marriage is traditionally the destiny offered to women by society. Most women are married or have been, or plan to be or suffer from not being.
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Anais Nin shows an occasional grace in writing, but her work is quite foreign to me, precisely because she wants so much to be feminine and not feminist. And then she is so gaga before so many men. She talks about men I know in France, men who were less than nothing, and she considers them kings, extraordinary people.
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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
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I am not at all for a feminism which is entirely separatist, which would say, this domain is purely for women. I don't believe that at all.
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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.
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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.
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Christianity gave eroticism its savor of sin and legend when it endowed the human female with a soul.
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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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Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.
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It is for man to establish the reign of liberty in the midst of the world of the given. To gain the supreme victory, it is necessary, for one thing, that by and through their natural differentiation men and women unequivocally affirm their brotherhood.
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A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into?
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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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Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.
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Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.
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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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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.
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