If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.
Jean-Paul SartreRead
It is only in our decisions that we are important.
Interpretation
Our significance arises from the choices we make.
This quote by Jean-Paul Sartre emphasizes the existentialist belief that an individual's importance is defined by their decisions and actions rather than by external factors or inherent qualities. It suggests that our freedom to choose reflects our essence and gives our lives meaning.
In practice
In a motivational speech about making impactful life choices.
If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.
All I want is' - and he uttered the final words through clenched teeth and with a sort of shame - 'to retain my freedom.' I should myself have thought,' said Jacques, 'that freedom consisted in frankly confronting situations into which one had deliberately entered, and accepting all one's responsibilities. But that, no doubt, is not your view.
If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.
A kiss without a moustache, they said then, is like an egg without salt; I will add to it: and it is like Good without Evil.
I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good.
Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.
No matter what system you live under, there is no escaping the law that it's always the strongest, the cruellest, the least generous who win.
If you trace back all those links in the chain that had to be in place for me to be here, the laws of probability maintain that my very existence is miraculous. But then after however many decades, less than a hundred years, they disburse and I cease to be. So while they're all congregated and coordinated to make me, then-and I speak her on behalf of all those trillions of atoms-I should really make the most of things.
Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear.
Eternity is not an everlasting flux of time, but time is as a short parenthesis in a long period.
Don't compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons.
All work is an act of philosophy.
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