If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Our physical body shapes our experience and interaction with the world around us.
Simone De Beauvoir emphasizes the significance of the body as a vessel that enables us to engage with and understand our surroundings. The quote suggests that our physical presence not only allows us to perceive the world but also influences how we relate to it and exert our influence within it.
Themes
BodyInstrumentWorldExperienceExistence
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about the philosophy of embodiment in a college lecture.
More from Simone De Beauvoir
All quotes βTwo 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 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.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
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That Hegelian dialectics should provide a wonderful instrument for always being right, because they permit the interpretations of all defeats as the beginning of victory, is obvious. One of the most beautiful examples of this kind of sophistry occurred after 1933 when the German Communists for nearly two years refused to recognize that Hitler's victory had been a defeat for the German Communist Party.
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