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Picasso never thought of himself as avant-garde. I just find it a bad way to think of yourself.

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
Never
Think
Thinking
Garde
Avant
Picasso
Thought
Find
Way

More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

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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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Ce n'est gue' re que dans les asiles que les coquettes gardent avec ente tement une foi entie' re en des regards absents normalement, elles re clament des te moins. Women fond of dress are hardly ever entirely satisfied not to be seen, except among the insane usually they want witnesses.
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Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.
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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.
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If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it a discussion
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Society turns away from the aged worker as though he belonged to another species. That is why the whole question is buried in a conspiracy of silence. Old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization.
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To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.
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Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.
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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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You have to start from where you are today and from what can be done.
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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.
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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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It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency.
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all success cloaks a surrender
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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.
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Anais Nin shows an occasional grace in writing, but her work is quite foreign to me, precisely because she wants so much to be feminine and not feminist. And then she is so gaga before so many men. She talks about men I know in France, men who were less than nothing, and she considers them kings, extraordinary people.
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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.
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Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.
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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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That is what chills your spine when you read an account of a suicide: not the frail corpse hanging from the window bars but what happened inside that heart immediately before.
Simone de Beauvoir