If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
It must be said in addition that the men with the most scrupulous respect for embryonic life are also those who are most zealous when it comes to condemning adults to death in war.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the contradiction in valuing life at different stages, highlighting hypocrisy in views on life and death.
Simone De Beauvoir points out the inconsistency in societal attitudes toward life, contrasting the respect given to embryonic life with the disregard for adult life in the context of war. This reflects a deeper philosophical examination of how value is assigned to life based on context and circumstance, suggesting a need for a more cohesive ethic regarding the sanctity of life.
In practice
In a debate about pro-life policies, this quote can emphasize the need for consistent ethical standards.
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.
I am against nature. I don't dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay.
For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.
Meek Walton's heavenly memory.
My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.
To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self.
In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.
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