If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
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.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the desire for introspection and self-acceptance, highlighting the conflict between one's inner and outer selves.
In this quote, Simone De Beauvoir expresses a longing for a dual existence where one part of herself engages with the world while the other observes and understands her experiences. This highlights the complexities of self-perception and suggests that true self-love and acceptance might come from having a deeper awareness of one's own thoughts and feelings, enabling one to appreciate oneself without envy of others.
In practice
During a self-help seminar discussing the importance of self-acceptance.
If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
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)
To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.
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.
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.
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.
The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.
This is what I know. I look like my father. My father disappeared when he was seventeen years old. Hannah once told me that there is something unnatural about being older than your father ever got to be. When you can say that at the age of seventeen, it's a different kind of devastating.
I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist. I’m the space between what I’d like to be and what others made of me. Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room.
What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
The difference between animals and humans is that animals change themselves for the environment, but humans change the environment for themselves.
Let's go." "We can't." "Why not?" "We're waiting for Godot.
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