A Quote by Simone de Beauvoir

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.

Simone de Beauvoir

Quote Topics

Both Does Dying Itself Life Life Is Living Maintain Only Perpetuating Surpassing Then

Quote Author

Simone de Beauvoir
French - Writer
January 9, 1908 - April 14, 1986

When one existentially awakens from within, the relation of birth-and-death is not seen as a sequential change from the former to the latter. Rather, living as it is, is no more than dying, and at the same time there is no living separate from dying. This means that life itself is death and death itself is life. That is, we do not shift sequentially from birth to death, but undergo living-dying in each and every moment.

Masao Abe

Everything that from eternity has happened in heaven and earth, the life of God and all the deeds of time simply are the struggles for Spirit to know Itself, to find Itself, be for Itself, and finally unite itself to Itself; it is alienated and divided, but only so as to be able thus to find itself and return to Itself...As existing in an individual form, this liberation is called 'I'; as developed to its totality, it is free Spirit; as feeling, it is Love; and as enjoyment, it is Blessedness.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The mind in itself wants nothing, unless it creates a want for itself; therefore it is both free from perturbation and unimpeded, if it does not perturb and impede itself.

Marcus Aurelius

To despair over one's sins indicates that sin has become or wants to be internally consistent. It wants nothing to do with the good, does not want to be so weak as to listen occasionally to other talk. No, it insists on listening only to itself, on having dealings only with itself; it closes itself up within itself, indeed, locks itself inside one more inclosure, and protects itself against every attack or pursuit by the good by despairing over sin.

Soren Kierkegaard

"The Universe repeats itself, with the possible exception of history." Of all earthly studies history is the only one that does not repeat itself. ... Astronomy repeats itself; botany repeats itself; trigonometry repeats itself; mechanics repeats itself; compound long division repeats itself. Every sum if worked out in the same way at any time will bring out the same answer. ... A great many moderns say that history is a science; if so it occupies a solitary and splendid elevation among the sciences; it is the only science the conclusions of which are always wrong.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

We are just a little tiny flicker of a much larger flame that is Life itself, Consciousness itself, Being itself, Love itself, God’s very self.

Richard Rohr

All death in nature is birth, and at the moment of death appears visibly the rising of life. There is no dying principle in nature, for nature throughout is unmixed life, which, concealed behind the old, begins again and develops itself. Death as well as birth is simply in itself, in order to present itself ever more brightly and more like to itself.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself it does not bring happiness. Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create a new order in consciousness.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge. Just as a knife doesn't cut itself, fire doesn't burn itself, light doesn't illuminate itself. It's always an endless mystery to itself.

Alan Watts

The Gods have a lesson that tells you to build and destroy and that's the cycle of life. Things have to be destroyed and then it has to be rebuilt. I think rap always go through cycles where it appears that it's destroying itself but it's actually purging itself and after it purges itself it comes into another state of being.

Mic Geronimo

Evil does not question itself. Only Hope questions itself.

Craig Ferguson

I've filled my whole life trying to preserve the memory of living, in the fight against dying. Perhaps the only thing I've done, since stopping death is impossible, is to show this fight. The fight itself does not satisfy us either.

Christian Boltanski

Love does not seek to please itself, but offers itself and its life to others.

Frederick Lenz

A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration--it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself.

John Cage

We do not live so that we can eat, nor do we just eat so that we can live. Life is worth living in and of itself. Life cannot be satisfied when it is lived out as a consuming entity. When it is filled by that which satisfies a hunger that is both physical and spiritual in a mutuality that sustains both without violation of either, only then can life be truly fulfilling.