If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself.
Interpretation
The quote implies that men often seek relationships with women for their own gratification rather than for genuine connection.
Simone De Beauvoir's quote suggests that many men enter relationships not purely for the companionship or love of the woman, but to fulfill their own desires and reflect their own needs. This perspective can highlight the often selfish motives behind romantic attachments and invites a deeper examination of how societal norms may influence personal relationships.
In practice
This quote can be used in discussions about the dynamics of modern relationships during a seminar on gender studies.
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 have learned that a man has the right and obligation to look down at another man, only when that man needs help to get up from the ground.
I have two homes, like someone who leaves their hometown and/or parents and then establishes a life elsewhere. They might say that they're going home when they return to see old friends or parents, but then they go home as well when they go to where they live now. Sarajevo is home, Chicago is home.
Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It's the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close quarters, seen too much of your pain or envy or, perhaps more than anything, your shame, who, at the crucial moment, can be too easy to cut out, to exile, to expel, to kill off.
Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word.
The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.
My wife and I tried two or three times in the last 40 years to have breakfast together, but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.
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