Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong.
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He formed his sentences hesitantly and then threw them at me with such force that I felt as if I were receiving a present each time.
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The nearer I come to the end of my days, the more I am enabled to see that strange thing, a life, and to see it whole.
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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.
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The individuals who seem to us most outstanding, who are honored with the name of genius, are those who have proposed to enact the fate of all humanity in their personal existences.
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I was struck by the absence, even among very young boys and girls, of any interior motivation; they were incapable of thinking, of inventing, of imagining, of choosing, of deciding for themselves; this incapacity was expressed by their conformism; in every domain of life they employed only the abstract measure of money, because they were unable to trust to their own judgment.
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A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into?
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Obviously, everything has always been defined by the dominant ideology. But the dominant ideology has been able to accept women's literature as well as men's literature. I would say that women have been hindered from creating for a variety of reasons, as Virginia Woolf so admirably explained in A Room of One's Own. When they have created, on the whole they have been recognized. In literature it hasn't been nearly as oppressive as in, say, painting, where even the existence of so many women painters has always been denied.
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Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.
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I think that Freud understood absolutely nothing about women - as he himself said.
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Many things would be changed for Americans if they would only admit that there is ill-luck in this world and that misfortune is not a priori a crime.
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In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.
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The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself.
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The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.
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All oppression creates a state of war.
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To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.
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It is a difficult matter for man to realize the extreme importance of social discriminations which seem outwardly insignificant but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature.
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Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess.
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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.
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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.
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All success cloaks a surrender.
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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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This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.
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There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.