"A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes."
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Quote collection
Simone de Beauvoir quotes (page 11 of 18)
355 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future."
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"The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one."
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"My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together."
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"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."
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"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."
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"It's frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself. It seems unfair. You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do --or don't do."
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"The renewed use of lobotomy today is particularly applicable to women: Because they do routine things, it is possible to take away their spirit of revolt, of debate, of criticism, and still leave them perfectly capable of making stews or washing dishes. It's terrible, this tendency to consider women something dangerous to society."
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"The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady, yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet."
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"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."
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"Women aren't more easily swayed by fascism than men, but I believe that their situation makes them in effect more slavish than men."
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"Truthfully speaking, women are dangerous, even those who aren't feminists, because there has always been a women's revolt. Only it has usually translated itself into solitary, individualist, disagreeable manifestations - the whole history of the taming of the shrew, the woman-shrew. They weren't shrews without cause."
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"In order to be an artist, one must be deeply rooted in the society."
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"For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay."
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"Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess."
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"We always come back to the same vicious circle - an extreme degree of material or intellectual poverty does away with the means of alleviating it."
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"It is a difficult matter for man to realize the extreme importance of social discriminations which seem outwardly insignificant but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature."
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"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."
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"Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death."
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"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."
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