Quote

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

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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
Ever
Minutes
Minute
Newness
Must
Rest
Speed
Anew
Dissemble
Things
Present
Merely
Thrillers
Unceasingly
Like
Since
Filled
Carries
Feverish
Within
Films
Carrie
Honorary
Next
Demand
Nowhere
Newer
Film
Americans
Curse
Thriller
Past
News
Alcohol
Sensational

More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

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A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.
Simone de Beauvoir
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I would certainly like to see some young women take up psychoanalysis seriously and reconstruct it from an absolutely new viewpoint.
Simone de Beauvoir
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To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Feminism is one way of attacking society as it now exists.
Simone de Beauvoir
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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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There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.
Simone de Beauvoir
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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
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To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Why does one exist? That's not my problem. One does exist. The thing to do is to take no notice but go at it on the run and to keep on going right on until you die.
Simone de Beauvoir
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That's what I consider true generosity. You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Women aren't more easily swayed by fascism than men, but I believe that their situation makes them in effect more slavish than men.
Simone de Beauvoir
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The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.
Simone de Beauvoir
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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
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all success cloaks a surrender
Simone de Beauvoir
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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.
Simone de Beauvoir
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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
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La femme?sait que quand on la regarde on ne la distingue pas de son apparence: elle est juge e, respecte e, de sire e a' travers sa toilette. Woman?knows that when she is looked at she is not considered apart from her appearance: she is judged, respected, desired, by and through her toilette.
Simone de Beauvoir