Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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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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I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where i slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat.
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Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.
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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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There are cases where the slave does not know his servitude and where it is necessary to bring the seed of his liberation to him from the outside: his submission is not enough to justify the tyranny which is imposed upon him.
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Marriage is a career which brings about more benefits than many others.
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Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.
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The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project.
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Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.
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It's true that this is one of the problems which often arises among my radical, revolutionary feminist friends: Do you have to join the system or not? On the one hand, if you don't, you risk being ineffectual. But if you do, from that moment on, you place your feminism at the service of a system which you want to take apart.
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The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself.
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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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Justice can never be done in the midst of injustice.
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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.
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I could see no reason for being sad. It´s just that it makes me unhappy not to feel happy.
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In order to be an artist, one must be deeply rooted in the society.
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I never thought of myself as being in the avant-garde. I said what I had to say, as I was able to say it.
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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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...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.
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It's only arrogance if you're wrong.
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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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She offered her mouth to him, as if enchanted. A Persian princess, a little Indian, a fox, a morning glory, a lovely wisteria--it always pleased them when you told them they looked like something, like something else.
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People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls.
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Picasso never thought of himself as avant-garde. I just find it a bad way to think of yourself.