Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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To show your true ability is always, in a sense, to surpass the limits of your ability, to go a little beyond them: to dare, to seek, to invent; it is at such a moment that new talents are revealed, discovered, and realized.
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The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it.
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Each person has his or her own very particular history and after all, the unconscious is the most secret part of ourselves.
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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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Dwelling-place and food are useful for life but give it no significance: the immediate goals of the housekeeper are only means, not true ends.
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At the moment of their emancipation, women have a need to write their own histories.
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On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself – on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.
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Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear, without having so much as a smile for the young future.
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...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.
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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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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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We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible.
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Marriage is a career which brings about more benefits than many others.
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She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.
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Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.
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In order to be an artist, one must be deeply rooted in the society.
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I went to get a detective story. You have to kill time. But time will kill me too - and there´s the true, preestablished balance.
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People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls.
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It's important that you think of your relationship with the world and the way you can express that world and that you not be stopped if it scandalizes or embarrasses; but you must not look for scandal or for the avant-garde as a thing in itself.
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Christianity gave eroticism its savor of sin and legend when it endowed the human female with a soul.
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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.
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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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Justice can never be done in the midst of injustice.
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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.