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Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself.
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
Relation
Woman
Modified
Action
Hormones
Others
Instincts
Women
Manner
Body
Mysterious
World
Instinct
Determined
More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir
Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.
Simone de Beauvoir
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
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.
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
Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.
Simone de Beauvoir
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. But we have seen that it is one of the lies of the serious mind to attempt to give the word useful an absolute meaning nothing is useful if it is not useful to man nothing is useful to man if the latter is not in a position to define his own ends and values, if he is not free.
Simone de Beauvoir
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
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
Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately.
Simone de Beauvoir
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity.
Simone de Beauvoir
Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one being active and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one.
Simone de Beauvoir
If you try consciously to be avant-garde, it's a little dangerous, like the present state of modern painting, where dealers try to be avant-garde, and under this pretext, painters take some old scraps and call it avant-garde.
Simone de Beauvoir
You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde.
Simone de Beauvoir
The nearer I come to the end of my days, the more I am enabled to see that strange thing, a life, and to see it whole.
Simone de Beauvoir
To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.
Simone de Beauvoir
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
