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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
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Simone de Beauvoir
Age: 78 †
Born: 1908
Born: January 9
Died: 1986
Died: April 14
Author
Autobiographer
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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
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Wisdom
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Beauty
Men
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Knowledge
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Lost
Usefulness
More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir
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
As soon as a woman re- fuses to be perfectly happy doing housework eight hours a day, society has a tendency to want to do a lobotomy on her.
Simone de Beauvoir
It's so easy to be mistaken about the future. Sometimes there are avant-gardes which believe themselves to be the avant-garde and which later find themselves to be absolutely dated.
Simone de Beauvoir
Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise. (p. 248)
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
Christianity gave eroticism its savor of sin and legend when it endowed the human female with a soul.
Simone de Beauvoir
The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation.
Simone de Beauvoir
Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.
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
History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.
Simone de Beauvoir
Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.
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
Old age is life's parody.
Simone de Beauvoir
I think that The Second Sex will seem an old, dated book, after a while. But nonetheless, a book which will have made its contribution. At least, I hope so.
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
There are so many problems. Women can go to work on these as well without giving up their feminism.
Simone de Beauvoir
There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.
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
The emancipation of women must be the work of women themselves, independent of the class struggle.
Simone de Beauvoir
Work almost always has a double aspect: it is a bondage, a wearisome drudgery but it is also a source of interest, a steadying element, a factor that helps to integrate the worker with society. Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
Simone de Beauvoir
