If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.
Interpretation
What this quote means
We must create our own reasons for living instead of waiting for them to come to us.
Simone De Beauvoir emphasizes the importance of finding one's own purpose in life rather than expecting it to be presented to us. This highlights the idea of personal responsibility and the active role we must take in defining our existence and motivations, suggesting that meaning is not something inherent but something we must actively create.
Themes
LivingPurposeSelf-DiscoveryResponsibilityExistence
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about personal growth.
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)
Simone De BeauvoirRead
To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
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.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
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.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
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
Similar quotes
The ways we miss our lives are life.
Randall JarrellRead
You cannot slander human nature; it is worse than words can paint it.
Charles SpurgeonRead
In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them.
Ayn RandRead
One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
Virginia WoolfRead
I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?
W. G. SebaldRead
Viscosity and velocity are opposites, yet they can look the same. Viscosity causes the stillness of disinclination, velocity causes the stillness of fascination. An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.
Susanna KaysenRead