If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.
Jean-Paul SartreRead
A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.
Interpretation
A defeat is largely a matter of perception; believing you have lost can be as significant as the loss itself.
Jean-Paul Sartre's quote highlights the psychological aspect of defeat, suggesting that one's mindset and interpretation of events can shape their experience of success and failure. If a person believes they have lost, they may as well have lost, as their perception can dictate their resolve to continue fighting and striving for victory.
In practice
During a motivational speech about resilience and overcoming challenges.
If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.
All I want is' - and he uttered the final words through clenched teeth and with a sort of shame - 'to retain my freedom.' I should myself have thought,' said Jacques, 'that freedom consisted in frankly confronting situations into which one had deliberately entered, and accepting all one's responsibilities. But that, no doubt, is not your view.
If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.
A kiss without a moustache, they said then, is like an egg without salt; I will add to it: and it is like Good without Evil.
I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good.
Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.
The fact that so many people choose to live in ways that narrow the community of fate to a very limited set of others and to define the rest as threatening to their way of life and values is deeply worrying because this contemporary form of tribalism, and the ideologies that support it, enable them to deny complex and more crosscutting mutual interdependencies-local, national, and international-and to elude their own role in creating long-term threats to their own wellbeing and that of others.
Religion is the organization of spirituality into something that became the hand maiden of conquerors. Nearly all religions were brought to people and imposed on people by conquerors, and used as the framework to control their minds.
He who acts under an emotional impulse also acts. What distinguishes an emotional action from other actions is the valuation of input and output. Emotions disarrange valuations. Inflamed with passion, man sees the goal as more desirable and the price he has to pay for it as less burdensome than he would in cool deliberation.
If you would serve your brother it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back your words when you find that prudent people do not commend you. Be true to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age.
The wisdom of God devised a way for the love of God to deliver sinners from the wrath of God while not compromising the righteousness of God.
The principle of tolerance and respect for freedom promoted by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council are today being manipulated and erroneously taken too far.
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