If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.
Interpretation
This quote expresses a deep yearning for a rich and fulfilling existence, encompassing both extremes of human experience.
Simone De Beauvoir's quote captures the complexity of human desires and the inherent contradictions within them. It illustrates a longing for a full spectrum of life's experiences, from companionship to solitude, selfishness to selflessness, and creativity to leisure. This struggle to attain a wide array of desires reflects the frustration and anger that can arise when one feels unable to achieve a well-rounded and satisfying life.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about embracing life's complexities.
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.
Even if you're happy with the life you've chosen, you're still curious about the other options.
Life's not breaths you take, but the moments that take your breath away.
Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.
I think it's like a relay race. You run, and you hand over the baton, and your kids pick it up. They take the stuff they want, throw the rest away, and keep running. That's what life is about.
Life is a song, sing it. Life is a struggle, accept it.
Man must live, not only exist; he must do, not merely be; he must grow, not just vegetate.
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