"A writer is hoisted up onto a pedestal only to scrutinize him more closely and conclude that it was a mistake to put him up there in the first place."
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Quote collection
Simone de Beauvoir quotes (page 17 of 18)
355 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately."
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"I was very fond of Lagneau’s phrase: “I have no comfort but in my absolute despair."
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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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"To refuse everything, to say, even when there is something which really should be done, "Ah, that's no longer feminist," is a pessimistic, even masochistic tendency in women, the result of having been habituated to inertia, to pessimism."
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"Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself."
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"Cooking is revolution and creation."
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"The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution -- not a social or a political revolution -- only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth."
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"The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her."
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"What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class."
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"Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, "I don't want to be just another blade of grass.""
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"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."
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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 bottom, antipsychiatry is still psychiatry. And it doesn't really address itself to women's problems."
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"I believe that we must use language. If it is used in a feminist perspective, with a feminist sensibility, language will find itself changed in a feminist manner. It will nonetheless be the language. You can't not use this universal instrument; you can't create an artificial language, in my opinion. But naturally, each writer must use it in his/her own way."
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"We can reorient science - for example, a kind of medicine much more directed toward the enormous number of women's health problems which are neglected now. But the original givens of this science are the same for men and for women. Women simply have to steal the instrument; they don't have to break it, or try, a priori, to make of it something totally different. Steal it and use it for their own good."
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"Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man."
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"It is not mere chance that makes families speak of a child who is 'extraordinary for his age' and also of an old man who is 'extraordinary for his age'; the extraordinariness lies in their behaving like human beings when they are either not yet or no longer men."
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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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"A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male."
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