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.
It’s not that I’ve been dishonest, it’s just that I loathe reality.
Be it or be it not true that Man is shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin, it is unquestionably true that Government is begotten of aggression, and by aggression.
Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case," in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.
My object in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism.
Though it be in the power of the weakest arm to take away life, it is not in the strongest to deprive us of death.
Existence permeates sexuality and vice versa, so that it is impossible to determine, in a given decision or action, the proportion of sexual to other motivations, impossible to label a decision or act ‘sexual’ or ‘non-sexual’ . There is no outstripping of sexuality any more than there is sexuality enclosed within itself. No one is saved and no one is totally lost.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.