Top 466 Quotes & Sayings by Jean-Paul Sartre - Page 6

That is exactly the writer's problem. What does literature stand for in a hungry world?

She suffers as a miser. She must be miserly with her pleasures, as well. I wonder if sometimes she doesn't wish she were free of this monotonous sorrow, of these mutterings which start as soon as she stops singing, if she doesn't wish to suffer once and for all, to drown herself in despair. In any case, it would be impossible for her: she is bound.

Torture is senseless violence, born in fear... torture costs human lives but does not save them. We would almost be too lucky if these crimes were the work of savages: the truth is that torture makes torturers.

Existence is an imperfection.

Men equally honest, equally devoted to their fatherland, are momentarily separated by different conceptions of their duty.

On my way to the office in the morning, there are, in front of me, behind me, other men going to their jobs. I see them; if I dared, I would smile at them. I think to myself that I am a socialist, that they are the purpose of my life, of my efforts and that they do not know it yet.

I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.

Respectable society believed in God in order to avoid having to speak about him.

For the time being I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of all flabby masses which move spontaneously.

A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.

I have seen children dying of hunger. Over against a dying child La Nausee cannot act as a counterweight.

I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.

I entered the Communist Party because its cause was just and I will leave it when it ceases to be just.

A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.

She smiled and said with an ecstatic air: "It shines like a little diamond", "What does?" "This moment. It is round, it hangs in empty space like a little diamond; I am eternal.

Some of these days, Oh, you'll miss me honey

He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.

emotion is first of all and in principle an accident

It is enough that one man hate another for hate to gain, little by little, all mankind.

First all men must be able to become men by the improvement of their conditions of existence, so that a universal morality can be created. If I begin by saying to them: "Thou shalt not lie," there is no longer any possibility of political action. What matters first is the liberation of man.

I admire [Samuel] Beckett, but I am totally against him. He seeks no improvement.

I have always been an optimist, perhaps even too much.

Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.

Existence is prior to essence.

It is too early to love. We will buy the right to do so by shedding blood.

Words There is no good father, that's the rule. Don't lay the blame on men but on the bond of paternity, which is rotten. To beget children, nothing better; to have them, what iniquity!

In Guinea I could read [Franz] Kafka. I re-discover in him my own discomfort.

We do not wish to say only that a man is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for that of all men.

At times discreetly, at times disgustingly, I yielded to the most fatal temptation whenever I could no longer bear it: as a result of impatience, Orpheus lost Eurydice; as a result of impatience, I lost myself.

Man's existence precedes his essence

To whomever gives a kiss or a blow Render a kiss or blow But to whomever gives when you are unable to return Offer all the hatred in your heart For you were slaves and he enslaves you

The characteristic of every neurosis is to represent itself as natural.

I maintain that inversion is the effect of neither a prenatal choice nor an endocrinal malformation nor even the passive and determined result of complexes. It is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.

I am responsible for everything... except my very responsibility.

From the period when I wrote La Nausea I wanted to create a morality. My evolution consists in my no longer dreaming of doing so.

Criticism often takes from the tree caterpillars and blossoms together.

I wrote in Les Mots that "I have often thought against myself." That sentence has not been understood either. Critics have seen in it a confession of masochism. But that is how one should think: revolting against everything "inculcated'' that one may have within oneself.

I do not understand! I understand nothing! I cannot understand nor do I want to understand! I want to believe! To Believe!

What never vary are the necessities of being in the world, of having to labor and to die there.

[Stéphane Mallarmé] theory of the hermetic is a mistake, but he can be only difficult to read when he has difficult things to say.

Hell is for other people.

The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.

As long as the writer cannot write for the two billion men who are hungry, he will be oppressed by a feeling of malaise.

For forty years I was conscripted by the absolute, the neurosis. The absolute is gone. There remain countless tasks among which literature is in no way privileged.

What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal... For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space.

Then I realized what separated us: what I thought about him could not reach him; it was psychology, the kind they write about in books. But his judgment went through me like a sword and questioned my very right to exist. And it was true, I had always realized it; I hadn't the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe. My life put out feelers towards small pleasures in every direction. Sometimes it sent out vague signals; at other times I felt nothing more than a harmless buzzing.

It is better; heavier, crueler. The mouth you wear for hell.

So long as one believes in God, one has the right to do the Good in order to be moral.

Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.

I have changed as everyone changes: within a permanency.

The public, too, has to make an effort in order to understand the writer who, though he renounce complacent obscurity, cannot always express his new-hidden thoughts lucidly and according to accepted models.

But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place.

I have nothing but contempt for you idiotic chosen ones who have the heart to rejoice when there are the damned in Hell and the poor on earth; as for me, I am on the side of men and I will not leave it.

[Andre] Gide can say it to me: it is a writer's morality only addressed to a few privileged people. For that reason it no longer interests me.

I grow warm, I begin to feel happy. There is nothing extraordinary in this, it is a small happiness of Nausea: it spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of out time - the time of purple suspenders, and broken chair seats; it is made of white, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain. No sooner than born, it is already old, it seems as though I have known it for twenty years.

In order to make myself recognized by the Other, I must risk my own life. To risk one's life, in fact, is to reveal oneself as not-bound to the objective form or to any determined existence — as not-bound to life.

There is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving.

To be responsible is to be the uncontested author of an event or thing.

Listen to me: a family man is never a real family man. An assassin is never entirely assassin. They play a role, you understand. While a dead man, he is really dead. To be or not to be, right?

That of War and Peace or of Almagestes. All are satisfactory. The only criterion of a work is its validity: that it should grip and that it should last.