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.
Your world is a living expression of how you are using and have used your mind.
Patricia embraces me on the station platform. 'The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,' she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. 'Nonsense, Patricia,' I tell her as I climb on board my train. 'The past's what you take with you.
The essential idea of Stoicism in my interpretation is, you don't control the world around you, you control how you respond. At 19, that's very empowering.
The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the less I value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; and as the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently, without asking too many questions.
There is no enlightenment outside of daily life.
I reject any religious doctrine that does not appeal to reason and is in conflict with morality.
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