If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.
Interpretation
What this quote means
True freedom involves transcending limitations rather than simply having the power to act without restraint.
Simone De Beauvoir's quote emphasizes that freedom is not merely the absence of constraints or the ability to act without limitations; instead, true freedom lies in the capacity to move beyond existing conditions and expectations towards a limitless future. It suggests that authentic freedom requires a conscious effort to challenge and transcend societal norms and personal barriers, allowing for growth, exploration, and new possibilities.
Themes
FreedomFutureLimitationsGrowthTranscendence
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about personal growth, one might quote De Beauvoir to illustrate the idea that true liberty involves overcoming obstacles.
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
Similar quotes
[A]nother important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.
Paul BowlesRead
I just know that there are plenty of people who are in terrible trouble and can't get out. And so I'm impatient with those who think that it's easy for people to get out of trouble.
Kurt VonnegutRead
Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.
Hermann HesseRead
I think we all want to know that if our lives don't turn out the way we imagine, there's still a purpose.
Steven Curtis ChapmanRead
I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far far away from the boundaries of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice; if you are enraged with me, I shall bear it. See, I cast the die, and I write the book. Whether it is to be read by the people of the present or of the future makes no difference: let it await its reader for a hundred years, if God himself has stood ready for six thousand years for one to study him.
Johannes KeplerRead
Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it.
Isaiah BerlinRead