Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

The word I think of is precarious. I am struck by how precarious it all is. How the things that hold us are only as strong as the faith we have in them.

Every plan is a house of cards.

The world is fine. Our place on it is precarious.

I stepped from plank to plank So slow and cautiously; The stars about my head I felt, About my feet the sea. I knew not but the next Would be my final inch,— This gave me that precarious gait Some call experience.

An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.

He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life,where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.

Life can be like walking on a high wire. Falling seems a tiny misstep away.

Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope: Temporary causes limit helplessness in time, and specific causes limit helplessness to the original situation.

Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

Such a woman is called "Mother's FRIEND" always ready to give judicious Parental advice and living vicariously on the experience of others

I'm always looking for something new and interesting to say. And it can't be something I'm directly experiencing.

Faith considers that its precariousness and its finiteness are but the womb in which it abides, moving toward the plenitude and fullness of the eternity which it desires and believes in and which revelation opens to it.

Around existence twine, (Oh, bridge that hangs across the gorge!) ropes of twisted vine.

His eyes beheld beauty not in reality but in the printed word. Standing in the waiting-room, he realized that in his life he had accepted secondary experience -- the experience of reading someone else's thoughts -- over real life.

Great, the worlds coming to an end and we're fixing it with Band-Aids

For even the best of peace training is more theoretical than practical experience ... indirect practical experience may be the more valuable because infinitely wider.

In the end, all solutions are temporary.

So you are lean and mean and resourceful and you continue to walk on the edge of the precipice because over the years you have become fascinated by how close you can walk without losing your balance.

I was also ready to believe, though, that whatever good things I had managed to set upright could topple at any second.

There is no safety this side of the grave

Our very walking is an incessant falling; a falling and a catching of ourselves before we come actually to the pavement. It is emblematic of all things a man does.

All politicians know that every 'temporary' political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever.

For peace do not hope; to be just you must break it. Still work for the minute and not for the year.

What is peace? Balance three iron skewers tip to tip, one upon the other; at the summit, emplace and egg, so that it too poises static in mid-air, and there you have the condition of peace in this world of men.

The key to life is balance, especially if you are on a ledge.