If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.
Interpretation
Understanding our true circumstances provides the foundation for our strength and purpose in life.
Simone De Beauvoir emphasizes the importance of recognizing and understanding the real conditions of our existence. By acknowledging these genuine conditions, we can find the strength necessary to endure life's challenges and the motivation to pursue our reasons for living meaningfully.
In practice
This quote could be used in a motivational speech to encourage self-awareness in personal growth.
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 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.
I came in contact with every known Indian anarchist in London. Their bravery impressed me, but I felt that their zeal was misguided. I felt that violence was no remedy for India's ills, and that her civilisation required the use of a different and higher weapon for self-protection. - Hind Swaraj
The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.
All happenings, great and small, are parables whereby God speaks. The art of life is to get the message. To see all that is offered us at the windows of the soul, and to reach out and receive what is offered, this is the art of living.
Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.
History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.
I am a man, and whatever concerns humanity is of interest to me.
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