If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
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
LoveEnchantmentBeautyComparisonAffection
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)
Simone De BeauvoirRead
To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
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.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
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.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
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.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
Similar quotes
The litmus test of our love for God is our love of neighbor.
Brennan ManningRead
What I need is a woman who is something, anything: either very beautiful or very kind or in the last resort very wicked; very witty or very stupid, but something.
Alfred De MussetRead
God dislikes evil, and no happiness can be built on hate. Love one another as brothers.
Josephine BakerRead
Fame may go by and - so long, I've had you.
Marilyn MonroeRead
His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.
Alice MunroRead
Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agised as in that hour left my lips: for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.
Charlotte BronteRead