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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.

-Simone De Beauvoir

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Why One Man Rather

Simone De Beauvoir

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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.

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Topic

Finding Yourself

More From Simone De Beauvoir

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.

The American Woman's Inequality With Men Is Proved By Her Defiant Attitude.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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

Fathers Never Have Exactly The Daughters They Want Because They Invent A Notion A Them That The Daughters Have To Conform To.

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

The Earthly Meaning Of Eternal Life Was Death, And She Refused To Die.

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.

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.

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

Science Condemns Itself To Failure When, Yielding To The Infatuation Of The Serious, It Aspires To Attain Being, To Contain It, And To Possess It; But It Finds Its Truth If It Considers Itself As A Free Engagement Of Thought In The Given, Aiming, At Each Discovery, Not At Fusion With The Thing, But At The Possibility Of New Discoveries; What The Mind Then Projects Is The Concrete Accomplishment Of Its Freedom.

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.

Writing Is A Trade ... Which Is Learned By Writing.

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

It's True That What You Find In New York Is Something Other Than America. Only Small Towns And Small Countries Are Self-satisfied; A Real Capital Goes Beyond Its Borders.

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.

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

I Realized That Even If We Went On Talking Till Judgment Day, I Would Still Find The Time All Too Short.

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

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

When I Was A Child, When I Was An Adolescent, Books Saved Me From Despair: That Convinced Me That Culture Was The Highest Of Values[...].

Youth And What The Italians So Prettily Call Stamina. The Vigor, The Fire, That Enables You To Love And Create. When You've Lost That, You've Lost Everything.

Lost Everything

It Is Not In Giving Life But In Risking Life That Man Is Raised Above The Animal; That Is Why Superiority Has Been Accorded In Humanity Not To The Sex That Brings Forth But To That Which Kills.

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.

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.

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

The Innumerable Conflicts That Set Men And Women Against One Another Come From The Fact That Neither Is Prepared To Assume All The Consequences Of This Situation Which The One Has Offered And The Other Accepted.

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.

Art Is An Attempt To Integrate Evil.

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.

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

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

There Is A Kind Of Universality In The Human Condition, Masculine Or Feminine. That's One Thing I Continue To Believe.

I Tore Myself Away From The Safe Comfort Of Certainties Through My Love For Truth - And Truth Rewarded Me.

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

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

This Is Certainly A Very Tricky Point: How To Ally Yourself To Other Leftist Forces Without Losing Your Feminist Specificity.

There Are Topics Which Are Common To Men And Women. I Think That If A Woman Speaks Of Oppression, Of Misery, She Will Speak Of It In Exactly The Same Way As A Man. But If She Speaks Of Her Own Personal Problems As A Woman, She Will Obviously Speak In Another Way.

Each Person Has His Or Her Own Very Particular History And After All, The Unconscious Is The Most Secret Part Of Ourselves.

A Man Is In The Right In Being A Man; It Is The Woman Who Is In The Wrong.

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.

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.

If You Are Writing Something In Which You Are Really Involved, You Don't Even Need To Think About It Any Longer. The Situation Itself Demands Your Total Commitment As An Individual, Just As In Your Political Commitments.

One Can Hardly Tell Women That Washing Up Saucepans Is Their Divine Mission, [so] They Are Told That Bringing Up Children Is Their Divine Mission. But The Way Things Are In The World, Bringing Up Children Has A Great Deal In Common With Washing Up Saucepans.

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

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

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.

If Her Functioning As A Female Is Not Enough To Define Woman, If We Decline Also To Explain Her Through "the Eternal Feminine," And If Nevertheless We Admit, Provisionally, That Women Do Exist, Then We Must Face The Question: What Is A Woman?

Sign Of Old Age: Distress At All Leave-takings, All Separations. And The Sadness Of Memories, Because I'm Aware They're Condemned To Death.

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.

I Think That Feminism Permits Women To Speak Among Themselves, Instead Of Simply Being Resentful, Having Personal Complaints, Which Get Them Nowhere And Which Make Them Sick And Ill-tempered, Depressive And Poison The Lives Of Their Husbands And Children. It's Much Better To Arrive At A Collective Consciousness Of This Problem, Which Is Both A Kind Of Therapy And The Basis For A Struggle.

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.

I Cannot Be Angry At God, In Whom I Do Not Believe.

Positive Atheism

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.

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)

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.

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.

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

Retirement Revives The Sorrow Of Parting, The Feeling Of Abandonment, Solitude And Uselessness That Is Caused By The Loss Of Some Beloved Person.

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.

Anais Nin Shows An Occasional Grace In Writing, But Her Work Is Quite Foreign To Me, Precisely Because She Wants So Much To Be Feminine And Not Feminist. And Then She Is So Gaga Before So Many Men. She Talks About Men I Know In France, Men Who Were Less Than Nothing, And She Considers Them Kings, Extraordinary People.

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

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

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

What An Odd Thing A Diary Is: The Things You Omit Are More Important Than Those You Put In.

On Ne Na|"t Pas Femme: On Le Devient. One Is Not Born A Woman: One Becomes A Woman.

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

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.

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.

Let Women Be Provided With Living Strength Of Their Own.

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.

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

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

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

Americans Are Nature-lovers: But They Only Admit Of Nature Proofed And Corrected By Man.

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.

It Is Old Age, Rather Than Death, That Is To Be Contrasted With Life. Old Age Is Life's Parody, Whereas Death Transforms Life Into A Destiny: In A Way It Preserves It By Giving It The Absolute Dimension. Death Does Away With Time.

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.

Habit Has A Kind Of Poetry.

Most Feminists In France Came To Feminism After '68 As A Result Of The Hypocrisy They Experienced In Leftist Movements. In These Movements, Where Everyone Believed There Was Going To Be True Equality, Fraternity Between Men And Women, And That Together They Were Going To Struggle Against This Rotten Society, Even There They Noticed That The Leftists, The Militants, Kept Them "in Their Place." Women Made The Coffee While The Others Did The Talking; They Were The Ones Who Typed The Letters.

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.

The Curse Which Lies Upon Marriage Is That Too Often The Individuals Are Joined In Their Weakness Rather Than In Their Strength - Each Asking From The Other Instead Of Finding Pleasure In Giving.

It Is So Difficult Not To Become Vain About One's Own Good Luck.

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

In Every Society The Artist Or Writer Remains An Outsider.

Marriage Is A Career Which Brings About More Benefits Than Many Others.

In The Face Of An Obstacle Which Is Impossible To Overcome, Stubbornness Is Stupid.

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

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

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.

At The Moment Of Their Emancipation, Women Have A Need To Write Their Own Histories.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There Is Not A Single Line In This Diary That Does Not Call For A Correction Or A Denial...yes: Throughout These Pages I Meant What I Was Writing And I Meant The Opposite; Reading Them Again I Feel Completely Lost...i Was Lying To Myself. How I Lied To Myself!

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.

The Most Sympathetic Of Men Never Fully Comprehend Woman's Concrete Situation.

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

Literature Is Born When Something In Life Goes Slightly Adrift.

One Is Not Born A Genius, One Becomes A Genius; And The Feminine Situation Has Up To The Present Rendered This Becoming Practically Impossible.

When Women Act Like Women, They Are Accused Of Being Inferior. When Women Act Like Human Beings, They Are Accused Of Behaving Like Men.

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

Justice Can Never Be Done In The Midst Of Injustice.

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.

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

The Curse Which Lies Upon Marriage Is That Too Often The Individuals Are Joined In Their Weakness Rather Than In Their Strength -each Asking From The Other Instead Of Finding Pleasure In Giving. It Is Even More Deceptive To Dream Of Gaining Through The Child A Plenitude, A Warmth, A Value, Which One Is Unable To Create For Oneself; The Child Brings Joy Only To The Woman Who Is Capable Of Disinterestedly Desiring The Happiness Of Another, To One Who Without Being Wrapped Up In Self Seeks To Transcend Her Own Existence.

In Truth We Need To Change The Society Itself, Men As Well As Women, To Change Everything.

On The Evenings When My Parents Held Parties, The Drawing-room Mirrors Multiplied To Infinity The Scintillations Of A Crystal Chandelier. Mama Would Take Her Seat At The Grand Piano To Accompany A Lady Dressed In A Cloud Of Tulle Who Played The Violin And A Cousin Who Performed On A Cello. I Would Crack Between My Teeth The Candied Shell Of An Artificial Fruit, And A Burst Of Light Would Illuminate My Palate With A Taste Of Blackcurrant Or Pineapple: All The Colours, All The Lights Were Mine, The Gauzy Scarves, The Diamonds, The Laces; I Held The Whole Party In My Mouth.

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.

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.

That A Whole Part Of The Middle Class Detests Me... Is Utterly Normal. I Would Be Troubled If The Contrary Were True.

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 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.

But I Must Admit I Didn´t Like That Idea; Do The Same Thing As Everyone Else. Eating To Live, Living To Eat - That Had Been The Nightmare Of My Adolescence. If It Meant Going Back To That, If Would Be Just As Well To Turn On The Gas At Once. But I Suppose Everyone Thinks Of Things Like That: Let´s Turn On The Gas At Once. And You Don´t Turn It On.

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

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

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.

What Is An Adult? A Child Blown Up By Age.

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.

Feminism Is One Way Of Attacking Society As It Now Exists.

In 1949, I Believed That Social Progress, The Triumph Of The Proletariat, Socialism Would Lead To The Emancipation Of Women. But I Saw That Nothing Came Of It: First Of All, That Socialism Was Not Achieved Anywhere, And That In Certain Countries Which Called Themselves Socialist, The Situation Of Women Was No Better Than It Was In So-called Capitalist Countries.

One Can Not Start By Saying That Our Earthly Destiny Has Or Has Not Importance, For It Depends Upon Us To Give It Importance.

To Will Freedom And To Will To Disclose Being Are One And The Same Choice; Hence, Freedom Takes A Positive And Constructive Step Which Causes Being To Pass To Existence In A Movement Which Is Constantly Surpassed.

There Is A Poetry In Making Preserves; The Housewife Has Caught Duration In The Snare Of Sugar, She Has Enclosed Life In Jars.

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.

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.

Tragedies Are All Right For A While: You Are Concerned, You Are Curious, You Feel Good. And Then It Gets Repetitive, It Doesn't Advance, It Grows Dreadfully Boring: It Is So Very Boring, Even For Me.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Today, However, We Are Having A Hard Time Living Because We Are So Bent On Outwitting Death.

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.

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

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.

Self-knowledge Is No Guarantee Of Happiness, But It Is On The Side Of Happiness And Can Supply The Courage To Fight For It.

People Seem To Think That If You Keep Your Head Empty You Automatically Fill Your Balls.

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 Individual Is Defined Only By His Relationship To The World And To Other Individuals; He Exists Only By Transcending Himself, And His Freedom Can Be Achieved Only Through The Freedom Of Others. He Justifies His Existence By A Movement Which, Like Freedom, Springs From His Heart But Which Leads Outside Of Himself.

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.

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.

It's Not A Very Big Step From Contentment To Complacency.

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.

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.

Cooking Is Revolution And Creation.

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

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.

Because We Are Separated Everything Separates Us, Even Our Efforts To Join Each Other.

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

To Be A Woman, If Not A Defect, Is At Least A Peculiarity.

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

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.

There Are Jobs That Can Be Done Equally Well By Men Or By Women And That Finally You Can't See A Difference. But From The Moment That You Involve Yourself Fully In Writing A Novel, For Example, Or An Essay, Then You Are Involved As A Woman, In The Same Way That You Can't Deny Your Nationality - You Are French, You Are A Man, You Are A Woman... All This Passes Into The Writing.

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

I Consider It Almost Antifeminist To Say That There Is A Feminine Nature Which Expresses Itself Differently, That A Woman Speaks Her Body More Than A Man, Because After All, Men Also Speak Their Bodies When They Write. Everything Is Implicated In The Work Of A Writer.

There Has To Be A Certain Relationship Between The Life And The Writing Style, And That Is Really A Problem.

It Is Doubtless Impossible To Approach Any Human Problems With A Mind Free From Bias.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

If The Feminine Issue Is So Absurd, Is Because The Male's Arrogance Made It "a Discussion

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.

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.

A Darwinian Nation Of Economic Fitness Abhors Idleness, Dependence, Non-productivity.

Society Cares About The Individual Only In So Far As He Is Profitable. The Young Know This. Their Anxiety As They Enter In Upon Social Life Matches The Anguish Of The Old As They Are Excluded From It.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Sex Pleasure In Woman Is A Kind Of Magic Spell; It Demands Complete Abandon; If Words Or Movements Oppose The Magic Of Caresses, The Spell Is Broken.

Words Have To Murder Reality Before They Can Hold It Captive.

Patience Is One Of Those Feminine Qualities Which Have Their Origin In Our Oppression But Should Be Preserved After Our Liberation.

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

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.

Buying Is Profound Pleasure.

All Success Cloaks A Surrender

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

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

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.

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.

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

Given Masculine Norms, It Is Clear That Women Are More Likely To Be Considered Crazy - I'm Not Saying To Be Crazy.

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Jean Paul Gaultier

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