If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.
Interpretation
Loving life makes the idea of immortality insignificant when faced with death.
Simone De Beauvoir's quote expresses the idea that a genuine love for life renders the concept of immortality meaningless in the face of death. It suggests that the richness of living fully in the present holds more significance than any notion of eternal existence, as appreciating life itself is what truly matters.
In practice
This quote would be great to share during a life appreciation workshop.
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 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.
I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.
But as an adult working in the fashion industry, I struggle with materialism. And I'm one of the least materialistic people that exist, because material possessions don't mean much to me. They're beautiful, I enjoy them, they can enhance your life to a certain degree, but they're ultimately not important.
Among American citizens, there should be no forgotten men and no forgotten races.
Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.
Most religions live from a narrative that shapes their relationship with the divine other, God or the gods, and with the human other, the stranger.
One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression. Patriotism becomes the order of the day, and those who question the war are seen as traitors, to be silenced and imprisoned.
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