The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

But by doing that, one manages only to save an abstract notion of freedom. If a door refuses to open, let us accept not opening it and there we are free. We could indeed assert our freedom against all constraint if we agreed to renounce the particularity of our projects. It was to escape this dilemma that the Stoics preached indifference. The failure condemns that whole part of ourselves which we had engaged in the effort. When an effort fails, one declares bitterly that he has lost time and wasted his powers.

If the man he has become looks upon these miscarried attempts of his adolescence with disillusioned indifference, there they are, forever frozen in the dead past. A young man has hoped for a happy or useful or glorious life. It transforms into phantoms and contingent reveries projects which had at the beginning been set up as will and freedom. Yet, there is hardly a sadder virtue than resignation. If I persist in beating my fist against a stone wall, my freedom exhausts itself in this useless gesture without succeeding in giving itself a content. “In the face of an obstacle which it is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid. In spite of so many stubborn lies, at every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men.” Perhaps in no other age have they manifested their grandeur more brilliantly, and in no other age has this grandeur been so horribly flouted. Each one has the incomparable taste in his mouth of his own life, and yet each feels himself more insignificant than an insect within the immense collectivity whose limits are one with the earth's. Though they are masters of the atomic bomb, yet it is created only to destroy them. The more widespread their mastery of the world, the more they find themselves crushed by uncontrollable forces. They know themselves to be the supreme end to which all action should be subordinated, but the exigencies of action force them to treat one another as instruments or obstacles, as means. “Men of today seem to feel more acutely than ever the paradox of their condition.

The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir