If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the value of seeking truth, even if it means leaving behind comforting beliefs.
Simone De Beauvoir's quote reflects the transformative power of pursuing truth over the safety of established beliefs. It highlights the struggle involved in challenging comforting certainties in favor of a deeper understanding of reality, suggesting that this quest for truth ultimately brings genuine rewards, including personal growth and enlightenment.
In practice
In a motivational speech about the importance of honesty and integrity.
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.
Perfection does not come from belief or faith. Talk does not count for anything. Parrots can do that. Perfection comes through the disinterested performance of action.
I believe you are your work. Don't trade the stuff of your life, time, for nothing more than dollars. That's a rotten bargain.
Commit yourself to deeper awareness. Be generous of spirit. Embrace every day as a new world. Let the timeless be in charge of time.
You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you've tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses.
We need an America with the wisdom of experience. But we must not let America grow old in spirit.
βOnce we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy.
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