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The Individuals Who Seem To Us Most Outstanding, Who Are Honored With The Name Of Genius, Are Those Who Have Proposed To Enact The Fate Of All Humanity In Their Personal Existences.

-Simone De Beauvoir

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The Individuals Who Seem

Simone De Beauvoir

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The Individuals Who Seem To Us Most Outstanding, Who Are Honored With The Name Of Genius, Are Those Who Have Proposed To Enact The Fate Of All Humanity In Their Personal Existences.

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Why One Man Rather Than Another? It Was Odd. You Find Yourself Involved With A Fellow For Life Just Because He Was The One That You Met When You Were Nineteen.

Finding Yourself

A Foreign Country Can Best Be Understood Through Its Literature.

Jealousy Is Not Contemptible, Real Love Has A Beak And Claws.

Work Would Be Terribly Boring If One Did Not Play The Game All Out, Passionately.

Retirement May Be Looked Upon Either As A Prolonged Holiday Or As A Rejection, A Being Thrown On To The Scrap-heap.

All The Idols Made By Man, However Terrifying They May Be, Are In Point Of Fact Subordinate To Him, And That Is Why He Will Always Have It In His Power To Destroy Them.

They [americans] Want To Believe That Good And Evil Can Be Defined In Precise Categories, That Good Is Already, Or Will Be Easily Achieved. ... If This Optimism Appears Too Superficial, They Will Try To Create A Kind Of Anti-god: The U.s.s.r. That Is Evil, And It Only Needs To Be Annihilated To Re-establish The Reign Of Good.

...counselling Man To Treat Her As A Slave While Persuading Her That She Is A Queen.

There Is Only One Good. And That Is To Act According To The Dictates Of One's Conscience.

To Protest In The Name Of Morality Against 'excesses' Or 'abuses' Is An Error Which Hints On Active Complicity. There Are No 'abuses' Or 'excesses' Here, Simpily An All-pervasive System.

The Ideal Of Happiness Has Always Taken Material Form In The House, Whether Cottage Or Castle; It Stands For Permanence And Separation From The World.

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.

When We Abolish The Slavery Of Half Of Humanity, Together With The Whole System Of Hypocrisy It Implies, Then The "division" Of Humanity Will Reveal Its Genuine Significance And The Human Couple Will Find Its True Form.

To Catch A Husband Is An Art; To Hold Him Is A Job.

Women Have Been Burnt As Witches Simply Because They Were Beautiful.

One Is Not Conceived A Lady, One Turns Into One.

Each Of Us Is Responsible For Everything And To Every Human Being.

It Is Perfectly Natural For The Future Woman To Feel Indignant At The Limitations Posed Upon Her By Her Sex. The Real Question Is Not Why She Should Reject Them: The Problem Is Rather To Understand Why She Accepts Them.

Perfectly Natural

Habit Has A Kind Of Poetry.

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.

When An Individual (or A Group Of Individuals) Is Kept In A Situation Of Inferiority, The Fact Is That He Is Inferior.

Self-consciousness Is Not Knowledge But A Story One Tells About Oneself.

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.

If You Haven't Been Happy Very Young, You Can Still Be Happy Later On, But It's Much Harder. You Need More Luck.

Representation Of The World, Like The World Itself, Is The Work Of Men; They Describe It From Their Own Point Of View, Which They Confuse With The Absolute Truth.

I Think That Where You Go Wrong Is That You Imagine That Your Reasons For Living Ought To Fall On You, Ready-made From Heaven, Whereas We Have To Find Them For Ourselves.

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.

You Can't Address Yourself To Women By Speaking A Language Which No Average Woman Will Understand. In My Opinion, It's Wrong.

What Would Prince Charming Have For Occupation If He Had Not To Awaken The Sleeping Beauty?

There Is Only One Solution If Old Age Is Not To Be An Absurd Parody Of Our Former Life, And That Is To Go On Pursuing Ends That Give Our Existence A Meaning.

Man Is A Talking Animal And He Will Always Let Himself Be Swayed By The Power Of The Word. Machines Won't Change Human Nature.

The Younger And Healthier A Woman Is And The More Her New And Glossy Body Seems Destined For Eternal Freshness, The Less Useful Is Artifice; But The Carnal Weakness Of This Prey That Man Takes And Its Ominous Deterioration Always Have To Be Hidden From Him...in Any Case, The More Traits And Proportions Of A Woman Seem Contrived, The More She Delighted The Heart Of Man Because She Seemed To Escape The Metamorphosis Of Natural Things. The Result Is This Strange Paradox That By Desiring To Grasp Nature, But Transfigured, In Woman, Man Destines Her To Artifice.

To Abstain From Politics Is In Itself A Political Attitude.

I Am Awfully Greedy; I Want Everything From Life. I Want To Be A Woman And To Be A Man, To Have Many Friends And To Have Loneliness, To Work Much And Write Good Books, To Travel And Enjoy Myself, To Be Selfish And To Be Unselfish… You See, It Is Difficult To Get All Which I Want. And Then When I Do Not Succeed I Get Mad With Anger.

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.

A Freedom Which Is Interested Only In Denying Freedom Must Be Denied. And It Is Not True That The Recognition Of The Freedom Of Others Limits My Own Freedom: To Be Free Is Not To Have The Power To Do Anything You Like; It Is To Be Able To Surpass The Given Toward An Open Future; The Existence Of Others As A Freedom Defines My Situation And Is Even The Condition Of My Own Freedom. I Am Oppressed If I Am Thrown Into Prison, But Not If I Am Kept From Throwing My Neighbor Into Prison.

We Belong To This Earth. Now I Can See The Truth ... I Love You On This Earth Of Ours. Love Me, Do!

Art Is An Attempt To Integrate Evil.

The Writer Can't Stop Her Unconscious From Showing Up, That's Certain.

Existentialism Does Not Offer To The Reader The Consolations Of An Abstract Evasion: Existentialism Proposes No Evasion. On The Contrary, Its Ethics Is Experienced In The Truth Of Life, And It Then Appears As The Only Proposition Of Salvation Which One Can Address To Men.

I Am Incapable Of Conceiving Infinity, And Yet I Do Not Accept Finity.

And Without A Doubt It Is More Comfortable To Endure Blind Bondage Than To Work For One's Liberation; The Dead, Too, Are Better Suited To The Earth Than The Living.

For Years I Thought My Work Still Lay Ahead, And Now I Find It Is Behind Me: There Was No Moment When It Took Place.

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.

Cooking Is Revolution And Creation.

Françoise Could Not Help Taking A Surreptitious Glance At Xavière: She Gave A Start Of Amazement. Xavière Was No Longer Watching, Her Head Was Lowered. Françoise Barely Suppressed A Scream. The Girl Was Pressing The Lighted End Against Her Skin, A Bitter Smile Curling Her Lips. It Was An Intimate, Solitary Smile, Like That Of A Half-wit; The Voluptuous, Tortured Smile Of A Woman Possessed Of Some Secret Pleasure.

The Body Is The Instrument Of Our Hold On The World.

Anyway I Know Only Too Well That All Life Is Nothing But A Brief Reprieve From Death.

Sometimes You Can Accept An Important Post, On Condition That It Really Puts You In A Position To Help Women. Unfortunately, Women Who Have Important Posts Very Often Adopt Masculine Standards-power, Ambition, Personal Success - And Cut Themselves Off From Other Women.

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.

Hegel Held That The Two Sexes Were Of Necessity Different, The One Being Active And The Other Passive, And Of Course The Female Would Be The Passive One.

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.

I Am Incapable Of Conceiving Infinity, And Yet I Do Not Accept Finity. I Want This Adventure That Is The Context Of My Life To Go On Without End.

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.

I Was Made For Another Planet Altogether. I Mistook The Way.

All Success Cloaks A Surrender

From The Very Beginning, Existentialism Defined Itself As A Philosophy Of Ambiguity.

He Reflected. 'i Know A Lot Of Different Kids Of People; What I Want Is To Show Each Of Them How The Others Really Are. You Hear So Many Lies!

Buying Is A Profound Pleasure.

The Knight Departing For New Adventures Offends His Lady, Yet She Has Nothing But Contempt For Him If He Remains At Her Feet.

The Point Is Not For Women Simply To Take Power Out Of Men’s Hands, Since That Wouldn’t Change Anything About The World. It’s A Question Precisely Of Destroying That Notion Of Power.

Work Almost Always Has A Double Aspect: It Is A Bondage, A Wearisome Drudgery; But It Is Also A Source Of Interest, A Steadying Element, A Factor That Helps To Integrate The Worker With Society. Retirement May Be Looked Upon Either As A Prolonged Holiday Or As A Rejection, A Being Thrown On To The Scrap-heap.

Even If One Is Neither Vain Nor Self-obsessed, It Is So Extraordinary To Be Oneself - Exactly Oneself And No One Else - And So Unique, That It Seems Natural That One Should Also Be Unique For Someone Else.

Therefore The Misfortune Which Comes To Man As A Result Of The Fact That He Was A Child Is That His Freedom Was First Concealed From Him And That All His Life He Will Be Nostalgic For The Time When He Did Not Know It's Exigencies.

Anger Or Revolt That Does Not Get Into The Muscles Remains A Figment Of The Imagination.

…but All Day Long I Would Be Training Myself To Think, To Understand, To Criticize, To Know Myself; I Was Seeking For The Absolute Truth: This Preoccupation Did Not Exactly Encourage Polite Conversation.

To Make Oneself An Object, To Make Oneself Passive, Is A Very Different Thing From Being A Passive Object.

No Woman Should Be Authorized To Stay At Home And Raise Her Children. Society Should Be Totally Different. Women Should Not Have That Choice, Precisely Because If There Is Such A Choice, Too Many Women Will Make That One.

Few Books Are More Thrilling Than Certain Confessions, But They Must Be Honest, And The Author Must Have Something To Confess.

The Communists, Following Hegel, Speak Of Humanity And Its Future As Of Some Monolithic Individuality. I Was Attacking This Illusion.

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.

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.

It Is In The Knowledge Of The Genuine Conditions Of Our Lives That We Must Draw Our Strength To Live And Our Reasons For Living.

I Think That Freud Understood Absolutely Nothing About Women - As He Himself Said.

The Time That One Gains Cannot Be Accumulated In A Storehouse; It Is Contradictory To Want To Save Up Existence, Which, The Fact Is, Exists Only By Being Spent And There Is A Good Case For Showing That Airplanes, Machines, The Telephone, And The Radio Do Not Make Men Of Today Happier Than Those Of Former Times.

History Is A Great Cemetery: Men, Deeds, Ideas Are Always Dying As Soon As They Are Born.

In Order To Be An Artist, One Must Be Deeply Rooted In The Society.

The Human Species Is Forever In A State Of Change, Forever Becoming.

Legislators, Priests, Philosophers, Writers, Ans Scientists Have Striven To Show That The Subordinate Position Of Woman Is Willed In Heaven And Advantageous On Earth.

Christian Ideology Has Contributed No Little To The Oppression Of Woman.

The Word Love Has By No Means The Same Sense For Both Sexes, And This Is One Cause Of The Serious Misunderstandings That Divide Them.

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."

Justice Can Never Be Done In The Midst Of Injustice.

I Could See No Reason For Being Sad. It´s Just That It Makes Me Unhappy Not To Feel Happy.

If Women Really Did Have Complete Equality With Men, Society Would Be Completely Overturned.

It Is Not The Inferiority Of Women That Has Caused Their Historical Insignificance; It Is Rather Their Historical Insignificance That Has Doomed Them To Inferiority.

Weakness' Is Weakness Only In Light Of The Aims Man Sets For Himself, The Instruments At His Disposal And The Laws He Imposes.

Oppression Tries To Defend Itself By Its Utility. But We Have Seen That It Is One Of The Lies Of The Serious Mind To Attempt To Give The Word "useful" An Absolute Meaning; Nothing Is Useful If It Is Not Useful To Man; Nothing Is Useful To Man If The Latter Is Not In A Position To Define His Own Ends And Values, If He Is Not Free.

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.

In A Way, Literature Is True Than Life,' He Said To Himself. 'on Paper, You Say Exactly And Completely What You Feel. How Easy It Is To Break Things Off On Paper! You Hate, You Shout, You Kill, You Commit Suicide; You Carry Things To The Very End. And That's Why It's False. But It's Damned Satisfying. In Life, You're Constantly Denying Yourself, And Others Are Always Contradicting You. On Paper, I Make Time Stand Still And I Impose My Convictions On The Whole World; They Become The Only Reality.

I Would Stand Transfixed Before The Windows Of The Confectioners' Shops, Fascinated By The Luminous Sparkle Of Candied Fruits, The Cloudy Lustre Of Jellies, The Kaleidoscope Inflorescence Of Acidulated Fruit Drops - Red, Green, Orange, Violet: I Coveted The Colours Themselves As Much As The Pleasure They Promised Me.

I Discovered Feminism Around 1970-72-precisely The Time When Feminism Began To Exist In France. Before That, There Was No Feminism.

The Fact That We Are Human Beings Is Infinitely More Important Than All The Peculiarities That Distinguish Human Beings From One Another.

There Are Moments When You Have To Write Certain Things And You Don't Have To Think Of Your Sex. If You Are Writing About The Population Of The Thirteenth District In Paris, Even If You Are Writing On The Women In The Thirteenth District, There's No Need To Consider Your Sex.

There Is No Such Thing As A Natural Death: Nothing That Happens To A Man Is Ever Natural, Since His Presence Calls The World Into Question. All Men Must Die: But For Every Man His Death Is An Accident And, Even If He Knows It And Consents To It, An Unjustifiable Violation.

Literature Is Born When Something In Life Goes Slightly Adrift.

Many Things Would Be Changed For Americans If They Would Only Admit That There Is Ill-luck In This World And That Misfortune Is Not A Priori A Crime.

Ce N'est Gue' Re Que Dans Les Asiles Que Les Coquettes Gardent Avec Ente" Tement Une Foi Entie' Re En Des Regards Absents; Normalement, Elles Re Clament Des Te Moins. Women Fond Of Dress Are Hardly Ever Entirely Satisfied Not To Be Seen, Except Among The Insane; Usually They Want Witnesses.

To Give Space When What One Most Yearns For Is Closeness, That Is Both The Great Test And Great Tragedy Of Love.

To Be Moral Is To Discover Fundamentally Ones Own Being.

It Is In Great Part The Anxiety Of Being A Woman That Devastates The Feminine Body.

Live With No Time-out.

When Someone You Love Dies You Pay For The Sin Of Outliving Her With A Thousand Piercing Regrets.

I Admire Freud A Great Deal As A Person And Thinker. Despite Everything, I Find His Work Very, Very Rich, But I Think That For Women He Has Been Absolutely Disastrous. And Even More So, Everyone Who Came After Him.

One Day I'll Be Old, Dead, Forgotten. And At This Very Moment, While I'm Sitting Here Thinking These Things, A Man In A Dingy Hotel Room Is Thinking, "i Will Always Be Here."

The Writer Of Originality, Unless Dead, Is Always Shocking, Scandalous; Novelty Disturbs And Repels.

One Is Not Born, But Rather Becomes, A Woman.

However Gifted An Individual Is At The Outset, If His Or Her Talents Cannot Be Developed Because Of His Or Her Social Condition, Because Of The Surrounding Circumstances, These Talents Will Be Still-born.

Whether You Think Of It As Heavenly Or As Earthly, If You Love Life Immortality Is No Consolation For Death.

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.

A Couple Who Go On Living Together Merely Because That Was How They Began, Without Any Other Reason: Was That What We Were Turning Into?

The Nearer I Come To The End Of My Days, The More I Am Enabled To See That Strange Thing, A Life, And To See It Whole.

If You Try Consciously To Be Avant-garde, It's A Little Dangerous, Like The Present State Of Modern Painting, Where Dealers Try To Be Avant-garde, And Under This Pretext, Painters Take Some Old Scraps And Call It Avant-garde.

Oppression Tries To Defend Itself By Its Utility.

From One Minute To The Next The Present Is Merely An Honorary Past. It Must Be Filled Unceasingly Anew To Dissemble The Curse It Carries Within Itself; That Is Why Americans Like Speed, Alcohol, Thriller Films And Any Sensational News: The Demand For New Things, And Ever Newer Things, Is Feverish Since Nowhere Will They Rest.

In Every Society The Artist Or Writer Remains An Outsider.

There Was A Time, In The Nineteenth Century, For Example, When Women Spoke Mostly About The House, Children, Birth, And So Forth, Because It Was Their Domain. That's Changing A Little, Now.

The Arrogance Of Some Christians Would Close Heaven To Them If, To Their Misfortune, It Existed.

There Is Something False In This Search For A Purely Feminine Writing Style. Language, Such As It Is, Is Inherited From A Masculine Society, And It Contains Many Male Prejudices. We Must Rid Language Of All That. Still, A Language Is Not Something Created Artificially; The Proletariat Can't Use A Different Language From The Bourgeoisie, Even If They Use It Differently, Even If From Time To Time They Invent Something, Technical Words Or Even A Kind Of Worker's Slang, Which Can Be Very Beautiful And Very Rich. Women Can Do That As Well, Enrich Their Language, Clean It Up.

Capabilities Are Clearly Manifested Only When They Have Been Realized.

As Soon As A Woman Re- Fuses To Be Perfectly Happy Doing Housework Eight Hours A Day, Society Has A Tendency To Want To Do A Lobotomy On Her.

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.

Political Revolution

It's Only Arrogance If You're Wrong.

A Man Of The Right Doesn't Write In The Same Way As A Man Of The Left, You Can See That Right Away, Or A Woman Of The Right Or A Woman Of The Left.

Society Cares For The Individual Only So Far As He Is Profitable.

Immortality Is A Terrible Curse.

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.

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.

Life Is Occupied In Both Perpetuating Itself And In Surpassing Itself; If All It Does Is Maintain Itself, Then Living Is Only Not Dying.

If I Were Proud Of Anything In My Life, It Would Be Of Our Love. I Feel We Have To Tell To Each Other As Many Things As We Can, So We Are Not Only Lovers, But The Closest Of Friends At The Same Time.

But Women Do Not Say 'we', Except At Some Congress Of Feminists Or Similar Formal Demonstration; Men Say 'women', And Women Use The Same Word In Referring To Themselves.

Man Is Defined As A Human Being And A Woman As A Female - Whenever She Behaves As A Human Being She Is Said To Imitate The Male.

... To Adapt One's Outlook To Another Person's Salvation Is The Surest And Quickest Way Of Losing Him.

You Can't Define The Future. And In My Opinion, You Can't Define The Avant-garde.

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.

She Was Not To Look Beyond Herself For The Meaning Of Her Life.

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.

Few Tasks Are More Like The Torture Of Sisyphus Than Housework, With Its Endless Repetition: The Clean Becomes Soiled, The Soiled Is Made Clean, Over And Over, Day After Day. The Housewife Wears Herself Out Marking Time: She Makes Nothing, Simply Perpetuates The Present … Eating, Sleeping, Cleaning – The Years No Longer Rise Up Towards Heaven, They Lie Spread Out Ahead, Grey And Identical. The Battle Against Dust And Dirt Is Never Won.

There Is The Problem Of Unpaid Labor, Such As Housework, Which Represents Millions And Millions Of Unsalaried Work Hours And On Which Masculine Society Is Firmly Based. To Put An End To This Would Be To Send The Present-day Capitalist System Flying In A Single Blow. Only We Can't Do It By Ourselves; There Have To Be Other Kinds Of Attacks On The System. So A Certain Alliance With Revolutionary Systems Is Necessary, Even Masculine Ones.

La Femme?sait Que Quand On La Regarde On Ne La Distingue Pas De Son Apparence: Elle Est Juge E, Respecte E, De Sire E A' Travers Sa Toilette. Woman?knows That When She Is Looked At She Is Not Considered Apart From Her Appearance: She Is Judged, Respected, Desired, By And Through Her Toilette.

To Lose Confidence In One’s Body Is To Lose Confidence In Oneself.

Society, Being Codified By Man, Decrees That Woman Is Inferior; She Can Do Away With This Inferiority Only By Destroying The Male's Superiority.

Society Turns Away From The Aged Worker As Though He Belonged To Another Species. That Is Why The Whole Question Is Buried In A Conspiracy Of Silence. Old Age Exposes The Failure Of Our Entire Civilization.

Let Women Be Provided With Living Strength Of Their Own.

Whatever The Country, Capitalist Or Socialist, Man Was Everywhere Crushed By Technology, Made A Stranger To His Own Work, Imprisoned, Forced Into Stupidity.

This Has Always Been A Man's World, And None Of The Reasons That Have Been Offered In Explanation Have Seemed Adequate.

‎a Day In Which I Don't Write Leaves A Taste Of Ashes.

Only A Woman Can Write What It Is To Feel As A Woman, To Be A Woman.

As Long As There Have Been Men And They Have Lived, They Have All Felt This Tragic Ambiguity Of Their Condition, But As Long As There Have Been Philosophers And They Have Thought, Most Of Them Have Tried To Mask It.

Si L'on Vit Assez Longtemps, On Voit Que Toute Victoire Se Change Un Jour En De Faite. If You Live Long Enough, You'll Find That Every Victory Turns Into A Defeat.

Regardless Of The Staggering Dimensions Of The World About Us, The Density Of Our Ignorance, The Risks Of Catastrophes To Come, And Our Individual Weakness Within The Immense Collectivity, The Fact Remains That We Are Absolutely Free Today If We Choose To Will Our Existence In Its Finiteness, A Finiteness Which Is Open On The Infinite. And In Fact, Any Man Who Has Known Real Loves, Real Revolts, Real Desires, And Real Will Knows Quite Well That He Has No Need Of Any Outside Guarantee To Be Sure Of His Goals; Their Certitude Comes From His Own Drive.

Every Time I Start On A New Book, I Am A Beginner Again. I Doubt Myself, I Grow Discouraged, All The Work Accomplished In The Past Is As Though It Never Was, My First Drafts Are So Shapeless That It Seems Impossible To Go On With The Attempt At All, Right Up Until The Moment - Always Imperceptible, There, Too, There Is A Break - When It Is Has Become Impossible Not To Finish It.

There Is No Justification For Present Existence Other Than Its Expansion Into An Indefinitely Open Future.

Literature Takes Its Revenge On Reality By Making It The Slave Of Fiction.

Existence Must Be Asserted In The Present If One Does Not Want All Life To Be Defined As An Escape Toward Nothingness.

The Most Mediocre Of Males Feels Himself A Demigod As Compared With Women.

All The Opportunities You Let Slip By! The Idea, The Inspiration Just Doesn´t Come Fast Enough. Instead Of Being Open, You´re Closed Up Tight. That´s The Worst Sin Of All - The Sin Of Omission.

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.

Eating, Sleeping, Cleaning - The Years No Longer Rise Up Toward Heaven, They Lie Spread Out Ahead, Gray And Identical. The Battle Against Dust And Dirt Is Never Won. Washing, Ironing, Sweeping, Ferreting Out Rolls Of Lint From Under Wardrobes - All This Halting Of Decay Is Also The Denial Of Life; For Time Simultaneously Creates And Destroys, And Only Its Negative Aspect Concerns The Housekeeper.

The Body Is Not A Thing, It Is A Situation: It Is Our Grasp On The World And Our Sketch Of Our Project

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.

I Like Everyone Who Tries To Show That Madness Is, In Large Part, Conditioned By Society And Particularly By The Family, And Therefore, Strongly Affects Women.

Two Separate Beings, In Different Circumstances, Face To Face In Freedom And Seeking Justification Of Their Existence Through One Another, Will Always Live An Adventure Full Of Risk And Promise." (p. 248)

The Women Of Today Are In A Fair Way To Dethrone The Myth Of Femininity; They Are Beginning To Affirm Their Independence In Concrete Ways; But They Do Not Easily Succeed In Living Completely The Life Of A Human Being.

To Will Oneself Moral And To Will Oneself Free Are One And The Same Decision.

You Can't Assume The Responsibility For Everything You Do Or Don't Do.

No Existence Can Be Validly Fulfilled If It Is Limited To Itself.

Old Age Was Growing Inside Me. It Kept Catching My Eye From The Depths Of The Mirror. I Was Paralyzed Sometimes As I Saw It Making Its Way Toward Me So Steadily When Nothing Inside Me Was Ready For It.

Buying Is Profound Pleasure.

In Fact, People Seem To Be Tired Of Fiction Now. There Are So Many Other Ways Of Exploring Humanity - By Ethnology, Psychoanalysis, And So On. It's A Little Boring To Make Up Stories. So Many People Think That It's Better To Be Very Close To Reality And To Recount One's Life As It Is Rather Than To Fictionalize, As They Say, That Is To Transpose, And Therefore To Cheat.

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.

She Was Ready To Deny The Existence Of Space And Time Rather Than Admit That Love Might Not Be Eternal.

The Whole World Was Nothing But An Exile With No Hope Of A Return.

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.

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.

I Take On A Shape And An Existence Only If I First Throw Myself Into The World By Loving, By Doing.

When Goya Was 80 He Drew An Ancient Man Propped On Two Sticks, With A Great Mass Of White Hair And Beard All Over His Face, And The Inscription, "i Am Still Learning."

Picasso Never Thought Of Himself As Avant-garde. I Just Find It A Bad Way To Think Of Yourself.

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.

She Was Trying To Get Rid Of A Religious Hangover.

Literature In France Seems To Be Undergoing A Crisis Now, And Nothing Comes Immediately To Mind.

I Wish That Every Human Life Might Be Pure Transparent Freedom.

The Emancipation Of Women Must Be The Work Of Women Themselves, Independent Of The Class Struggle.

Living By Proxy Is Always A Precarious Expedient.

Ah, If Only There Were Two Of Me, She Thought, One Who Spoke And The Other Who Listened, One Who Lived And One Who Watched, How I Would Love Myself! I Would Envy No One.

Harmony Between Two Individuals Is Never Granted-it Has To Be Conquered Indefinitely.

Defending The Truth Is Not Something One Does Out Of A Sense Of Duty Or To Allay Guilt Complexes, But Is A Reward In Itself.

To Be Oneself, Simply Oneself, Is So Amazing And Utterly Unique An Experience That It's Hard To Convince Oneself So Singular A Thing Happens To Everybody.

The Characteristic Feature Of All Ethics Is To Consider Human Life As A Game That Can Be Won Or Lost And To Teach Man The Means Of Winning.

It Is For Man To Establish The Reign Of Liberty In The Midst Of The World Of The Given. To Gain The Supreme Victory, It Is Necessary, For One Thing, That By And Through Their Natural Differentiation Men And Women Unequivocally Affirm Their Brotherhood.

The Torment That So Many Young Women Know, Bound Hand And Foot By Love And Motherhood, Without Having Forgotten Their Former Dreams.

To Emancipate Woman Is To Refuse To Confine Her To The Relations She Bears To Man, Not To Deny Them To Her; Let Her Have Her Independent Existence And She Will Continue Nonetheless To Exist For Him Also: Mutually Recognising Each Other As Subject, Each Will Yet Remain For The Other An Other...when We Abolish The Slavery Of Half Of Humanity, Together With The Whole System Of Hypocrisy That It Implies, Then The 'division' Of Humanity Will Reveal Its Genuine Significance And The Human Couple Will Find Its True Form.

I Had Never Believed In The Sacred Nature Of Literature. God Had Died When I Was Fourteen.

Women Aren't More Easily Swayed By Fascism Than Men, But I Believe That Their Situation Makes Them In Effect More Slavish Than Men.

At Bottom, Antipsychiatry Is Still Psychiatry. And It Doesn't Really Address Itself To Women's Problems.

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.

I Would Certainly Like To See Some Young Women Take Up Psychoanalysis Seriously And Reconstruct It From An Absolutely New Viewpoint.

It Is Only On Posters And In Advertisement Pages That Americans Have Those Chubby Cheeks, Expanding Smiles, Smooth Looks, And Faces Flushed With Well-being. In Fact, Almost All Are At Odds With Themselves; Drink Offers A Remedy For This Inner Malady Of Which Boredom Is The Most Usual Sign: As Drinking Is Accepted By Society, It Does Not Appear As A Sign Of Their [americans'] Inability To Adapt Themselves; It Is Rather The Adapted Form Of Inadaptability.

To Create A Language All Of A Piece Which Would Be A Women's Language, That I Find Quite Insane. There Does Not Exist A Mathematics Which Is Only A Women's Mathematics, Or A Feminine Science.

Can One Say That There Is A Way Of Crying Out, Of Speaking, Which Is Properly Feminine? Personally, I Don't Think So. In The End, I Find This Is Another Way Of Putting Women In A Kind Of Singularity, A Ghetto, Which Is Not What I Want. I Want Them To Be Singular And Universal At The Same Time.

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Mitch McConnell

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