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Every time a man dies, a child dies too, and an adolescent and a young man as well; everyone weeps for the one who was dear to him.
Simone de Beauvoir -
I was very fond of Lagneau’s phrase: “I have no comfort but in my absolute despair.
Simone de Beauvoir
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The innumerable conflicts that set men and women against one another come from the fact that neither is prepared to assume all the consequences of this situation which the one has offered and the other accepted.
Simone de Beauvoir -
A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.
Simone de Beauvoir -
I've always been keenly aware of the passing of time. I've always thought that I was old. Even when I was twelve, I thought it was awful to be thirty. I felt that something was lost. At the same time, I was aware of what I could gain, and certain periods of my life have taught me a great deal. But, in spite of everything, I've always been haunted by the passing of time and by the fact that death keeps closing in on us.
Simone de Beauvoir -
If you are truly on the left, if you reject ideas of power and hierarchy, what you want is equality. Otherwise, it won't work at all.
Simone de Beauvoir -
I would certainly like to see some young women take up psychoanalysis seriously and reconstruct it from an absolutely new viewpoint.
Simone de Beauvoir -
When an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior.
Simone de Beauvoir
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There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time. --But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.
Simone de Beauvoir -
There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Old age was growing inside me. It kept catching my eye from the depths of the mirror. I was paralyzed sometimes as I saw it making its way toward me so steadily when nothing inside me was ready for it.
Simone de Beauvoir -
And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The father's life is surrounded by mysterious prestige: the hours he spends in the home, the room where he works, the objects around him, his occupations, his habits, have a sacred character. It is he who feeds the family, is the one in charge and the head. Usually he works outside the home, and it is through him that the household communicates with the rest of the world: he is the embodiment of this adventurous, immense, difficult, and marvelous world; he is transcendence, he is God.
Simone de Beauvoir -
To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.
Simone de Beauvoir -
It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient.
Simone de Beauvoir
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From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.
Simone de Beauvoir -
What would Prince Charming have for occupation if he had not to awaken the Sleeping beauty?
Simone de Beauvoir -
Love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity.
Simone de Beauvoir -
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.
Simone de Beauvoir