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"I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity."
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"And what's beyond vastness? It shrinks."

"But there also seems to be in our culture a curious cautiousness - 'You'll get these abundant gratifications only if you don't feel too much, don't let on you want too much. The result is that, instead of conquering the world like Horatio Alger, we should wait passively until the genie of technology - which we don't push or influence, only await - brings us our appointed gratifications. All of this is a part of the rewards which go with belief in the vast myth of the machine in the twentieth century."

"The most powerful forces in the universe are infinite. Love, imagination, intuition, stillness. Then why should we define our soul?"

"If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all."

"I owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that was a source of vertiginous mystery during my childhood."

"Mathematicians aren't satisfied because they know there are no solutions up to four million or four billion, they really want to know that there are no solutions up to infinity."

"I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity."

"The Library is a sphere whose exact centre is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible."
Explore more quotes by Simone de Beauvoir


"I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me."


"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."


"But this element of failure is a very condition of his life; one can never dream of eliminating it without immediately dreaming of death. This does not mean that one should consent to failure, but rather one must consent to struggle against it without respite."


"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion."


"To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God's absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, & his victories as well."


"In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation."


"The adventure is which I have shared so passionately is not over--this adventure with its doubt, failure, the dreariness of no progress, then a glimpse of light, a hope, a hypothesis confirmed; and then after weeks and months of anxious perseverance, the intoxication of success."


"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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