If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.
Interpretation
To avoid old age becoming meaningless, one must continue to seek purposeful goals.
Simone De Beauvoir suggests that aging should not lead to a life devoid of significance. Instead, to ensure that our later years are not a mere caricature of our past selves, we must actively engage in pursuits that imbue our existence with meaning, thereby transforming the experience of aging into one of continuous growth and purpose.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of lifelong learning, this quote could inspire the audience to seek new goals.
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 … 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.
We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart.
Let my thoughts come to you, when I am gone, like the afterglow of sunset at the margin of starry silence.
In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic.
What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.
If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!
For Zen students, a weed is a treasure.
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