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...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.
Simone de Beauvoir -
People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls.
Simone de Beauvoir
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I willingly trust myself to chance. I let my thoughts wander, I digress, not only sitting at my work, but all day long, all night even. It often happens that a sentence suddenly runs through my head before I go to bed, or when I am unable to sleep, and I get up again and write it down.
Simone de Beauvoir -
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.
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 -
Buying is a profound pleasure.
Simone de Beauvoir -
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.
Simone de Beauvoir -
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
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A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong.
Simone de Beauvoir -
I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death.
Simone de Beauvoir -
There are jobs that can be done equally well by men or by women and that finally you can't see a difference. But from the moment that you involve yourself fully in writing a novel, for example, or an essay, then you are involved as a woman, in the same way that you can't deny your nationality - you are French, you are a man, you are a woman... all this passes into the writing.
Simone de Beauvoir -
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.
Simone de Beauvoir -
As long as the family and the myth of the family ... have not been destroyed, women will still be oppressed.
Simone de Beauvoir
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She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.
Simone de Beauvoir -
In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The women of today are in a fair way to dethrone the myth of femininity; they are beginning to affirm their independence in concrete ways; but they do not easily succeed in living completely the life of a human being.
Simone de Beauvoir -
In order to be an artist, one must be deeply rooted in the society.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself - exactly oneself and no one else - and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else.
Simone de Beauvoir
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La femme?sait que quand on la regarde on ne la distingue pas de son apparence: elle est juge e, respecte e, de sire e a' travers sa toilette. Woman?knows that when she is looked at she is not considered apart from her appearance: she is judged, respected, desired, by and through her toilette.
Simone de Beauvoir -
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.
Simone de Beauvoir -
This is certainly a very tricky point: How to ally yourself to other leftist forces without losing your feminist specificity.
Simone de Beauvoir -
To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.
Simone de Beauvoir