Quote

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

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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
Trying
Word
Useful
Mind
Lying
Absolutes
Utility
Men
Values
Absolute
Tries
Free
Lies
Defend
Ends
Meaning
Oppression
Give
Position
Define
Nothing
Serious
Latter
Giving
Seen
Attempt

More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

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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.
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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.
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Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death.
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Let women be provided with living strength of their own.
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I could see no reason for being sad. It´s just that it makes me unhappy not to feel happy.
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Anyway I know only too well that all life is nothing but a brief reprieve from death.
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It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.
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The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.
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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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One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, I will always be here.
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The women of today are in a fair way to dethrone the myth of femininity they are beginning to affirm their independence in concrete ways but they do not easily succeed in living completely the life of a human being.
Simone de Beauvoir
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In truth we need to change the society itself, men as well as women, to change everything.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
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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.
Simone de Beauvoir
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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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It's frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself. It seems unfair. You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do --or don't do.
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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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If women really did have complete equality with men, society would be completely overturned.
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I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.
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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