If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes individual autonomy and the complexity of self-identity.
Simone De Beauvoir expresses a profound assertion of personal independence and self-awareness. She declares that her intelligence, demands, and resourcefulness make it impossible for anyone to fully control or understand her. This reflects a deeper existential belief in the uniqueness of the self and the limitations of external relationships in truly knowing and loving another individual.
Themes
IntelligenceAutonomySelf-AwarenessRelationshipIdentity
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about self-empowerment, one might quote this to highlight the importance of personal independence.
More from Simone De Beauvoir
All quotes →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)
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 … 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.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
Similar quotes
Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity, one’s own and that of other people.
Leon TrotskyRead
And much as Wine has played the Infidel, And robbed me of my Robe of Honor Well, I often wonder what the Vintners buy One half so precious as the stuff they sell.
Edward FitzgeraldRead
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.
George OrwellRead
The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society.
Karl MarxRead
Greed and Gain, grim guardians of the great god Mammon, continually cry in the ears of the poor, 'Give us your little ones!' And forever do the poor push out their little ones at the imperious ukase, feeding the children to a blind Hunger that is never filled.
Edwin MarkhamRead
Gnostic politics is self-defeating in so far as its disregard for the structure of reality leads to continuous warfare.
Eric VoegelinRead