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.
Worshipping God is the great essential of fitness. If you have not been worshipping...when you get to work you will not only be useless yourself, but a tremendous hindrance to those who are associated with you.
The behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor.
It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it.
The high destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule.
One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful even if it is only a floating ash.
Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.
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