If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
I went to get a detective story. You have to kill time. But time will kill me too - and there´s the true, preestablished balance.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the inevitability of time and the balance between life and the passage of time.
Simone De Beauvoir's quote speaks to the notion of time as both an ally and an adversary in the human experience. While we often engage in activities to 'kill time', the profound realization is that time itself is relentless and will eventually prevail over us. This duality highlights the importance of acknowledging our mortality and the fleeting nature of existence, emphasizing the balance between living in the moment and facing the inevitable end.
In practice
During a philosophical discussion on the nature of life at a seminar.
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.
Distrust brings frustration and fear. So therefore, the lonely feeling automatically come. So, lonely feeling is not creation of environment, but creation of your own mental attitude.
If the black box flight recorder is never damaged during a plane crash, why isn’t the whole airplane made out of that stuff?
The problem with people who are afraid of imagination, of fantasy, is that their world becomes so narrow that I don't see how they can imagine beyond what their senses can verify. We know from science that there are entire worlds that our senses can't verify.
Eventually I lost interest in trying to control my life, to make things happen in a way that I thought I wanted them to be. I began to practice surrendering to the universe and finding out what "it" wanted me to do.
All history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development.
Money alone is absolutely good, because it is not only a concrete satisfaction of one need in particular; it is an abstract satisfaction of all.
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