If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
Ah, if only there were two of me, she thought, one who spoke and the other who listened, one who lived and one who watched, how I would love myself! I would envy no one.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the desire for introspection and self-acceptance, highlighting the conflict between one's inner and outer selves.
In this quote, Simone De Beauvoir expresses a longing for a dual existence where one part of herself engages with the world while the other observes and understands her experiences. This highlights the complexities of self-perception and suggests that true self-love and acceptance might come from having a deeper awareness of one's own thoughts and feelings, enabling one to appreciate oneself without envy of others.
In practice
During a self-help seminar discussing the importance of self-acceptance.
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 … 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.
Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like - Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything - but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there
History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)
Death is woven in with the violets,” said Louis. “Death and again death.”)
Religion is a feature of cultural evolution that, among other things, addresses anxieties created by cultural evolution; it helps keep social change safe from itself.
Without adventure civilization is in full decay. ... The great fact [is] that in their day the great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.