If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the value of seeking truth, even if it means leaving behind comforting beliefs.
Simone De Beauvoir's quote reflects the transformative power of pursuing truth over the safety of established beliefs. It highlights the struggle involved in challenging comforting certainties in favor of a deeper understanding of reality, suggesting that this quest for truth ultimately brings genuine rewards, including personal growth and enlightenment.
In practice
In a motivational speech about the importance of honesty and integrity.
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 β¦ Eating, sleeping, cleaning β 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.
A ray of imagination or of wisdom may enlighten the universe, and glow into remotest centuries.
Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours. When you make a decision to "be" a particular way, you can count on change and external circumstances to come along which will challenge that decision. Remain vigilant after declaring a major decision and manage yourself in relationship to the goal. Set up structures that support you staying on target.
Do not deny the classical approach, simply as a reaction, or you will have created another pattern and trapped yourself there.
Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.
After meditating for some years, I began to see the patterns of my own behavior. As you quiet your mind, you begin to see the nature of your own resistance more clearly, struggles, inner dialogues, the way in which you procrastinate and develop passive resistance against life. As you cultivate the witness, things change. You don't have to change them. Things just change.
Advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill.
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