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One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.
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
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Conceived
Lady
More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir
It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.
Simone de Beauvoir
The arrogance of some Christians would close heaven to them if, to their misfortune, it existed.
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
If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through the eternal feminine, and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman?
Simone de Beauvoir
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
Love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity.
Simone de Beauvoir
there is a poetry in making preserves the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.
Simone de Beauvoir
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
The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.
Simone de Beauvoir
Old age is better for women than for men. First of all, they have less far to fall, since their lives are more mediocre than those of most men.
Simone de Beauvoir
A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.
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
--There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time. --But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.
Simone de Beauvoir
The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.
Simone de Beauvoir
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
It's frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself. It seems unfair. You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do --or don't do.
Simone de Beauvoir
The time that one gains cannot be accumulated in a storehouse it is contradictory to want to save up existence, which, the fact is, exists only by being spent and there is a good case for showing that airplanes, machines, the telephone, and the radio do not make men of today happier than those of former times.
Simone de Beauvoir
To be feminist doesn't mean simply to do nothing, to reduce yourself to total impotence under the pretext of refusing masculine values. There is a problematic, a very difficult dialectic between accepting power and refusing it, accepting certain masculine values, and wanting to transform them. I think it's worth a try.
Simone de Beauvoir
The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change.
Simone de Beauvoir
I like everyone who tries to show that madness is, in large part, conditioned by society and particularly by the family, and therefore, strongly affects women.
Simone de Beauvoir