If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Our lives are meaningful when we recognize and value the lives of others through love and compassion.
Simone De Beauvoir emphasizes the interconnectedness of human existence, positing that the value of one's own life is intrinsically linked to how one perceives and values the lives of others. By fostering love, friendship, indignation toward injustice, and compassion, we enrich our existence and affirm the worth of those around us, highlighting that a meaningful life is not lived in isolation but within a community of mutual respect and understanding.
Themes
ValueLifeLoveFriendshipCompassion
In practice
Example use cases
During a graduation speech, to highlight the importance of community.
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)
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To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.
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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 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
But the most obvious fact about praise β whether of God or anything β strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it.
C. S. LewisRead
For as the interposition of a rivulet, however small, will occasion the line of the phalanx to fluctuate, so any trifling disagreement will be the cause of seditions; but they will not so soon flow from anything else as from the disagreement between virtue and vice, and next to that between poverty and riches.
AristotleRead
Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.
Edmund BurkeRead
Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.
Rebecca SolnitRead
And so, lastly, does the very name of "Catholic", which, not without reason, amid so many heresies, the Church has thus retained; so that, though all heretics wish to be called Catholics, yet when a stranger asks where the Catholic Church meets, no heretic will venture to point to his own chapel or house.
Saint AugustineRead
Human progress planned as alternatives (to God's plan) introduce in justice, evil and violence rising against the divine plan of justice and salvation. And despite transitory and apparent successes, they are reduced to simple machinations destined to dissolution and failure.
Pope John Paul IiRead