If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that excessive analysis or narration of a victory can make it feel like a defeat.
Jean-Paul Sartre's quote highlights the idea that when we analyze and recount a victory in extensive detail, we may lose the essence of that triumph, turning it into something that resembles defeat. This reflects on how perceptions can shift depending on the narrative, suggesting that context and interpretation play crucial roles in how we understand our experiences and achievements.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about the importance of perspective in success.
All I want is' - and he uttered the final words through clenched teeth and with a sort of shame - 'to retain my freedom.' I should myself have thought,' said Jacques, 'that freedom consisted in frankly confronting situations into which one had deliberately entered, and accepting all one's responsibilities. But that, no doubt, is not your view.
If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.
A kiss without a moustache, they said then, is like an egg without salt; I will add to it: and it is like Good without Evil.
I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good.
Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.
Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
While in a vintage restaurant..."the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.
This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts.
Time starts out as a notion. But after you turn fifty, time is not a notion anymore but a fact that you start feeling clearly, and in a way, it pushes you to become present in the present.
If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a nation gone under.
It's dangerous to read the Internet about yourself when you're me. Or when you're anyone in the public eye.
People may assume 'The Act of Killing' is a historical documentary about what happened in 1965. But our purpose was to expose a present-day regime of fear for what it is.
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