If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Acting in accordance with your conscience is the highest good.
This quote by Simone De Beauvoir emphasizes the importance of individual moral responsibility and the necessity of aligning one's actions with personal conscience. It suggests that true goodness lies not in external rules or societal expectations, but in authentically following one's own moral compass, whatever that may be.
Themes
ConscienceMoralityGoodnessActionIndividuality
In practice
Example use cases
In a class discussion about ethics, this quote can help illustrate the importance of personal integrity.
More from Simone De Beauvoir
All quotes βTwo 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 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.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
Similar quotes
It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.
Aldous HuxleyRead
Remus Lupin was supposed to be on the H.I.V. metaphor. It was someone who had been infected young, who suffered stigma, who had a fear of infecting others, who was terrified he would pass on his condition to his son. And it was a way of examining prejudice, unwarranted prejudice towards a group of people. And also, examining why people might become embittered when they're treated that unfairly.
J. K. RowlingRead
You are right in speaking of the moral foundations of science, but you cannot turn around and speak of the scientific foundations of morality.
Albert EinsteinRead
Before I started writing about food, my focus was really on the human relationship to plants. Not only do plants nourish us bodily - they nourish us psychologically.
Michael PollanRead
I would do what I pleased, and doing what I pleased, I should have my will, and having my will, I should be contented; and when one is contented, there is no more to be desired; and when there is no more to be desired, there is an end of it.
Miguel De CervantesRead
A society that does not value its older people denies its roots and endangers its future. Let us strive to enhance their capacity to support themselves for as long as possible and, when they cannot do so anymore, to care for them.
Nelson MandelaRead