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I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.
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
Fourteen
Believed
God
Sacred
Died
Literature
Nature
Never
More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir
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.
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
The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change.
Simone de Beauvoir
Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.
Simone de Beauvoir
Ce n'est gue' re que dans les asiles que les coquettes gardent avec ente tement une foi entie' re en des regards absents normalement, elles re clament des te moins. Women fond of dress are hardly ever entirely satisfied not to be seen, except among the insane usually they want witnesses.
Simone de Beauvoir
If women really did have complete equality with men, society would be completely overturned.
Simone de Beauvoir
The Sahara was a spectacle as alive as the sea. The tints of the dunes changed according to the time of day and the angle of the light: golden as apricots from far off, when we drove close to them they turned to freshly made butter behind us they grew pink from sand to rock, the materials of which the desert was made varied as much as its tints.
Simone de Beauvoir
There are so many problems. Women can go to work on these as well without giving up their feminism.
Simone de Beauvoir
In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider.
Simone de Beauvoir
You have to start from where you are today and from what can be done.
Simone de Beauvoir
When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies, then the division of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.
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
What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class.
Simone de Beauvoir
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you've lost that, you've lost everything.
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
The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it.
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
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
If the unconscious must express itself it will do so through the work that you do consciously or subconsciously, with words, with what you have to say.
Simone de Beauvoir