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It is true that nothing is gained without something being lost: everyone knows that in fulfilling oneself one necessarily sacrifices some possibilities.
Simone de Beauvoir -
At the moment of their emancipation, women have a need to write their own histories.
Simone de Beauvoir
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To show your true ability is always, in a sense, to surpass the limits of your ability, to go a little beyond them: to dare, to seek, to invent; it is at such a moment that new talents are revealed, discovered, and realized.
Simone de Beauvoir -
To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simpily an all-pervasive system.
Simone de Beauvoir -
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 -
I discovered feminism around 1970-72-precisely the time when feminism began to exist in France. Before that, there was no feminism.
Simone de Beauvoir -
To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.
Simone de Beauvoir -
To create a language all of a piece which would be a women's language, that I find quite insane. There does not exist a mathematics which is only a women's mathematics, or a feminine science.
Simone de Beauvoir
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It's only arrogance if you're wrong.
Simone de Beauvoir -
When Goya was 80 he drew an ancient man propped on two sticks, with a great mass of white hair and beard all over his face, and the inscription, "I am still learning."
Simone de Beauvoir -
Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, "I don't want to be just another blade of grass."
Simone de Beauvoir -
Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.
Simone de Beauvoir -
We belong to this earth. Now I can see the truth ... I love you on this earth of ours. Love me, do!
Simone de Beauvoir -
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
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The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Art is an attempt to integrate evil.
Simone de Beauvoir -
On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself – on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.
Simone de Beauvoir -
There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.
Simone de Beauvoir -
It's important that you think of your relationship with the world and the way you can express that world and that you not be stopped if it scandalizes or embarrasses; but you must not look for scandal or for the avant-garde as a thing in itself.
Simone de Beauvoir -
If the unconscious must express itself it will do so through the work that you do consciously or subconsciously, with words, with what you have to say.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Marriage is a career which brings about more benefits than many others.
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