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I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing.
Simone de Beauvoir -
I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself
Simone de Beauvoir
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I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.
Simone de Beauvoir -
There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.' There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.
Simone de Beauvoir -
There is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Women's mutual understanding comes from the fact that they identify themselves with each other; but for the same reason each is against the others.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Anais Nin shows an occasional grace in writing, but her work is quite foreign to me, precisely because she wants so much to be feminine and not feminist. And then she is so gaga before so many men. She talks about men I know in France, men who were less than nothing, and she considers them kings, extraordinary people.
Simone de Beauvoir
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I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.
Simone de Beauvoir -
I think there is a great tendency toward autobiography among women today. It is perhaps facile - and I say that even though I have written one myself.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The human species is forever in a state of change, forever becoming.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Let women be provided with living strength of their own. Let them have the means to attack the world and wrest from it their own subsistence, and their dependence will be abolished -- that of man also.
Simone de Beauvoir -
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 -
The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.
Simone de Beauvoir
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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 -
It's only arrogance if you're wrong.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The emancipation of women must be the work of women themselves, independent of the class struggle.
Simone de Beauvoir -
You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde.
Simone de Beauvoir