If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote expresses a deep yearning for a rich and fulfilling existence, encompassing both extremes of human experience.
Simone De Beauvoir's quote captures the complexity of human desires and the inherent contradictions within them. It illustrates a longing for a full spectrum of life's experiences, from companionship to solitude, selfishness to selflessness, and creativity to leisure. This struggle to attain a wide array of desires reflects the frustration and anger that can arise when one feels unable to achieve a well-rounded and satisfying life.
Themes
DesireFulfillmentLifeContradictionExperience
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about embracing life's complexities.
More from Simone De Beauvoir
All quotes →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)
Simone De BeauvoirRead
To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
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.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
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.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
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.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
Similar quotes
I'll get back to the whores and the horses and the booze, while there's time.
Charles BukowskiRead
I've lived a life that's full, I traveled each and ev'ry highway, And more, much more than this, I did it my way.
Paul AnkaRead
You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.
Wallace StegnerRead
You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories.
Anne LamottRead
Most people think that a widow is inhabiting some elegiac world of - it's like Mozart's 'Requiem Mass.' You know, it's very beautiful and elevated thoughts and some measure of dignity. I didn't have that experience at all. I had one pratfall after another.
Joyce Carol OatesRead
On balance, my life has been a constant stream of blessings rather than disappointments and failures and tragedies. I wish I had been re-elected. I think I could have kept our country at peace. I think I could have consolidated what we achieved at Camp David with a treaty between Israel and the Palestinians.
Jimmy CarterRead