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The state of emotional intoxication allows one to grasp existence in one's self and in the other, as both subjectivity and passivity. The two partners merge in this ambiguous unity each one is freed of his own presence and achieves immediate communication with the other.

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
Existence
Immediate
Merge
State
Allows
Achieves
Two
Partners
Passivity
States
Unity
Subjectivity
Self
Presence
Intoxication
Communication
Freed
Emotional
Ambiguous
Achieve
Grasp

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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.
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I don't want to be just another blade of grass.
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I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.
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History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.
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Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.
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Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.
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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.
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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)
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However gifted an individual is at the outset, if his or her talents cannot be developed because of his or her social condition, because of the surrounding circumstances, these talents will be still-born.
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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.
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Buying is a profound pleasure.
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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.
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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.
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Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.
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To refuse everything, to say, even when there is something which really should be done, Ah, that's no longer feminist, is a pessimistic, even masochistic tendency in women, the result of having been habituated to inertia, to pessimism.
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.
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The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change.
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I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.
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Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.
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There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.
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