If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the connection between the concepts of time and death, emphasizing the inevitability and fear of decay.
Simone De Beauvoir examines the profound relationship between time and death, expressing the anxiety that arises from the awareness of our mortality. She highlights how the passage of time is not just a measure of our existence but is also intertwined with the fear of decay and the ultimate end that death represents. This contemplation invites a deeper reflection on how we live our lives, knowing that each moment brings us closer to our inevitable fate.
In practice
In a discussion about life's impermanence during a philosophy lecture.
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.
Spirituality is not a question of morality, it is a question of vision. Spirituality is not the practising of virtues - because if you practise a virtue it is no longer a virtue. A practised virtue is a dead thing, a dead weight. Virtue is virtue only when it is spontaneous; virtue is virtue only when it is natural, unpractised - when it comes out of your vision, out of your awareness, out of your understanding.
There’s always a choice. That’s God’s way, always will be. Your will is still free. Do as you will. There’s no set of leg-irons on you. But... this is what God wants of you.
I saw above a sea of hills A solitary planet shine, And there was no one, near or far, to keep the world from being mine.
But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.
My aunt once said that the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness.
It is also possible for the unconscious or an archetype to take complete possession of a man and to determine his fate down to the smallest detail
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