If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial...Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost...I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself!
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects the complexity of self-deception and the struggle for self-understanding.
Simone De Beauvoir's quote highlights the idea of internal conflict and the tendency to misrepresent one's thoughts and emotions to oneself. The act of writing is portrayed as an exploration of truth, yet it is clouded by contradictions and lies that the author recognizes only upon reflection, suggesting that self-awareness is a challenging but essential journey.
Themes
Self-DeceptionTruthIntrospectionReflectionConflict
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be shared in a mental health awareness seminar to discuss self-perception.
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
Fear? What has a man to do with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day.
SophoclesRead
Where once the student was taught that the unexamined life was not worth living, he is now taught that the profitably lived life is not worth examining.
Benjamin BarberRead
A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution is power without a right. All power exercised over a nation, must have some beginning. It must be either delegated, or assumed. There are not other sources. All delegated power is trust, and all assumed power is usurpation. Time does not alter the nature and quality of either.
Thomas PaineRead
The greatest error of a man is to think that he is weak by nature, evil by nature. Every man is divine and strong in his real nature. What are weak and evil are his habits, his desires and thoughts, but not himself.
Ramana MaharshiRead
Looking deeply at life as it is in this very moment, the meditator dwells in stability and freedom.
Gautama BuddhaRead
You, boy, who owe everything to a name
Mark AntonyRead