If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial...Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost...I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself!
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects the complexity of self-deception and the struggle for self-understanding.
Simone De Beauvoir's quote highlights the idea of internal conflict and the tendency to misrepresent one's thoughts and emotions to oneself. The act of writing is portrayed as an exploration of truth, yet it is clouded by contradictions and lies that the author recognizes only upon reflection, suggesting that self-awareness is a challenging but essential journey.
Themes
Self-DeceptionTruthIntrospectionReflectionConflict
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be shared in a mental health awareness seminar to discuss self-perception.
More from Simone De Beauvoir
All quotes →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)
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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 … 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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