If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.
Interpretation
What this quote means
We must create our own reasons for living instead of waiting for them to come to us.
Simone De Beauvoir emphasizes the importance of finding one's own purpose in life rather than expecting it to be presented to us. This highlights the idea of personal responsibility and the active role we must take in defining our existence and motivations, suggesting that meaning is not something inherent but something we must actively create.
Themes
LivingPurposeSelf-DiscoveryResponsibilityExistence
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about personal growth.
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)
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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
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