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
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.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about embracing life's complexities.
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.
Life is a daring adventure or nothing.
The person may have a scar, but it also means they have a story
The heart may freeze, or it can burn. The pain will ease and I can learn. There is no future, there is no past. I live this moment as, my last.
We're always looking over our shoulders, 'what they will think, what the press will think, what will this one - am I making the right career move?' When you're young you have to do all that to survive, I suppose.
O Lord God, we pray that we may be inspired to nobleness of life in the least things. May we dignify all our daily life. May we set such a sacredness upon every part of our life, that nothing shall be trivial, nothing unimportant, and nothing dull, in the daily round.
You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It's invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.
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