Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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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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She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life.
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Eating, sleeping, cleaning - the years no longer rise up toward heaven, they lie spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won. Washing, ironing, sweeping, ferreting out rolls of lint from under wardrobes - all this halting of decay is also the denial of life; for time simultaneously creates and destroys, and only its negative aspect concerns the housekeeper.
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It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.
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Men create their own gods and thus have some slight understanding that they are self-fabricated. Women are much more susceptible, because they are completely oppressed by men; they take men at their word and believe in the gods that men have made up. The situation of women, their culture, makes them kneel more often before the gods that have been created by men than men themselves do, who know what they've done. To this extent, women will be more fanatical, whether it is for fascism or for totalitarianism.
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The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady, yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet.
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I think it's wrong to write in a totally esoteric language when you want to talk about things which interest a multitude of women.
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The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one.
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Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.
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In 1949, I believed that social progress, the triumph of the proletariat, socialism would lead to the emancipation of women. But I saw that nothing came of it: first of all, that socialism was not achieved anywhere, and that in certain countries which called themselves socialist, the situation of women was no better than it was in so-called capitalist countries.
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It's so easy to be mistaken about the future. Sometimes there are avant-gardes which believe themselves to be the avant-garde and which later find themselves to be absolutely dated.
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Why does one exist? That's not my problem. One does exist. The thing to do is to take no notice but go at it on the run and to keep on going right on until you die.
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When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.
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Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies.
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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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I think that Freud understood absolutely nothing about women - as he himself said.
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Habit has a kind of poetry.
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There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.
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It must be said in addition that the men with the most scrupulous respect for embryonic life are also those who are most zealous when it comes to condemning adults to death in war.
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Women aren't more easily swayed by fascism than men, but I believe that their situation makes them in effect more slavish than men.
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Harmony between two individuals is never granted-it has to be conquered indefinitely.
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A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.
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I am not at all for a feminism which is entirely separatist, which would say, "this domain is purely for women." I don't believe that at all.
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The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.