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
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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.
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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.
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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
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If you carry someone else's fears and live by someone else's values, you may find that you have lived their lives.
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Those who travel to mountain-tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.
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The promise of pleasures so alluring that we may devote our lives to their pursuit, and then the haunting realization that these pleasures ultimately do not satisfy.
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