If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
She offered her mouth to him, as if enchanted. A Persian princess, a little Indian, a fox, a morning glory, a lovely wisteria--it always pleased them when you told them they looked like something, like something else.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses a sense of enchantment in love, highlighting the beauty of comparing a lover to enchanting elements of nature and culture.
Simone De Beauvoir's quote evokes a sense of romantic allure and the power of comparison in conveying affection. By likening a beloved to various beautiful entities—from nature to cultural symbols—she captures how love can transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, emphasizing the deep admiration and enchantment that often accompanies romantic relationships. Such comparisons serve not only to elevate the individual in question but also to enrich the emotional experience of love itself.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a romantic speech during a wedding.
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)
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 … 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.
Similar quotes
She even touches Jimmy's face on the photos, and I see what it is to love someone like Milla loved that man. Her fingertips are made of love.
What does it mean when a man falls in love with a radiant face across the room? It may mean that he has some soul work to do. His soul is the issue. Instead of pursuing the woman and trying to get her alone, away from her husband, he needs to go alone himself, perhaps to a mountain cabin, for three months, write poetry, canoe down a river, and dream. That would save some women a lot of trouble.
You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.
Locked together in hatred. But I can't hate you Louis. Louis my love, I was mortal till you gave me your immortal kiss. You became my mother, and my father, and so I'm yours forever. But now it's time to end it, Louis. Now it's time to leave him.
It was the love of love, the love of swallows up all else, a grateful love, a love of natural, of people, of animals, a love ingengering gentleness and goodness that moved meand that I saw in you
When I first saw you with your smile so tender, my heart was captured, my soul surrendered.