Simone de Beauvoir — "One is not born a genius, one becomes one."
One is not born a genius, one becomes one.
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More from Simone de Beauvoir
"A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drowned, he said, for he will be going out on a day when he should not. But we do not choose the day for the sea. She chooses it for us."
"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 b…"
"I am too intelligent, too demanding, too resourceful for anyone to be able to satisfy me sensibly."
"Her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly."
"The most authentic human existence is one that is constantly in flux, constantly becoming."
About Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)
French existentialist philosopher whose The Second Sex (1949) is the foundational text of modern feminist theory. Closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre (lifetime partner and existentialist co-founder) and Albert Camus (existentialist contemporary in Paris). For an intellectual contrast, see Camille Paglia, American cultural critic and Sexual Personae author — Paglia argues for biological-essentialist roots of gender that Beauvoir's social-construction view — 'one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman' — explicitly rejects. The two are the cleanest constructed-vs-essentialist poles in feminist theory.
The standard scholarly entry points to Simone de Beauvoir's work: Toril Moi (Duke, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor) — Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994); Margaret A. Simons (Southern Illinois University, Emerita) — Beauvoir and The Second Sex (1999); Kate Kirkpatrick (Oxford, Regent's Park College) — Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (2019). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Simone de Beauvoir.