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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
Believed
God
Sacred
Died
Literature
Nature
Never
Fourteen
More quotes by 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
It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.
Simone de Beauvoir
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
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
You can't address yourself to women by speaking a language which no average woman will understand. In my opinion, it's wrong.
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
From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.
Simone de Beauvoir
In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider.
Simone de Beauvoir
I consider it almost antifeminist to say that there is a feminine nature which expresses itself differently, that a woman speaks her body more than a man, because after all, men also speak their bodies when they write. Everything is implicated in the work of a writer.
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
Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.
Simone de Beauvoir
She was trying to get rid of a religious hangover.
Simone de Beauvoir
To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.
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
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.
Simone de Beauvoir
Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.
Simone de Beauvoir
The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.
Simone de Beauvoir
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.
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
