Top 466 Quotes & Sayings by Jean-Paul Sartre - Page 7

So it comes to this; one doesn’t need rest. Why bother about sleep if one isn’t sleepy? That stands to reason, doesn’t it? Wait a minute, there’s a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why, now, should it be disagreeable? …Ah, I see; it’s life without a break.

You see, I'm fond of teasing, it's a second nature with me—and I'm used to teasing myself. Plaguing myself, if you prefer; I don't tease nicely.

Do you think I can read [Alain] Robbe-Grillet in an underdeveloped country? He does not feel himself maimed.

Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of form a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all.

I am not asking for sensational revelations, but I would like to sense the meaning of that minute, to feel it's urgency.

I am myself and I am here.

It's just what people do when they're getting old, when they're sick of themselves and their life; they think of money and take care of themselves.

The revolution you dream of is not ours. You don't want to change the world; you want to blow it up.

I clung to nothing, in a way I was calm. But it was a horrible calm—because of my body; my body, I saw with its eyes, I heard with its ears, but it was no longer me; it sweated and trembled by itself and I didn’t recognize it any more.

I must be without remorse or regrets as I am without excuse; for from the instant of my upsurge into being, I carry the weight of the world by myself alone without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.

A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.

It is not right, my fellow-countrymen, you who know very well all the crimes committed in our name. It's not at all right that you do not breathe a word about them to anyone, not even to your own soul, for fear of having to stand in judgment of yourself. I am willing to believe that at the beginning you did not realize what was happening; later, you doubted whether such things could be true; but now you know, and still you hold your tongues.

It is not a matter of indifference whether we like oysters or clams, snails or shrimp, if only we know how to unravel the existential significance of these foods.

Abjection is a methodological conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian epoche: it establishes the world as a closed system which consciousness regards from without, in the manner of divine understanding.

Many young people today do not concern themselves with style. They think that what one says should be said simply and that is all. For me, style - which does not exclude simplicity, quite the opposite - is above all a way of saying three or four things in one. There is the simple sentence, with its immediate meaning, and then at the same time, below this immediate meaning, other meanings are organized. If one is not capable of giving language this plurality of meaning, then it is not worth the trouble to write.

In any case, if you ever leave me with a handsome man, do not tell me that you trust me because, let me warn you: that is not what will prevent me from deceiving you, if I want to. On the contrary.

Love or hatred calls for self-surrender. He cuts a fine figure, the warm-blooded, prosperous man, solidly entrenched in his well-being, who one fine day surrenders all to love—or to hatred; himself, his house, his land, his memories.

A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness...and suddenly the “I” pales, pales, and fades out.

Absurd, irreducible; nothing--not even a profound and secret delirium of nature--could explain [a tree root].

Never have I thought that I was the happy possessor of a "talent;" my sole concern has been to save myself by work and faith.

I considered calmly that I was born to write.

Life is a useless passion.

One could only damage oneself through the harm one did to others. One could never get directly at oneself.

I was a neophyte in another world [in 1954].

The [Communist] Party has one objective: the creation of a socialist economy; and one means: the utilization of the class struggle.

I’ve dropped out of their hearts like a little sparrow fallen from its nest. So gather me up, dear, fold me to your heart – and you’ll see how nice I can be.

I was escaping from Nature and at last becoming myself, that Other whom I was aspiring to be in the eyes of others.

A human being who wakened in the morning with a queesy stomach, with fifteen hours to kill before next bedtime, had not much use for freedom.

Happiness has to be installed in each person as a state of affairs completely cut off from the process that brought it about and, in particular, from the real situation. Man has to be affected with happiness. It is a tonality given to him. Contradiction: if one does take care to give him happiness, it is because he is a free creature--but in order to give it to him, one turns him into an object.

Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.

In a country lacking leaders, in Africa, for instance, how could a native educated in Europe refuse to become a professor, even at the price of his literary vocation?

I have always been happy. Even if I had been more honest with regard to myself at that moment I should still have written La Nausee.

In Les Mots I explain the origin of my madness, of my neurosis. This analysis may help the young who dream of writing.

The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure nihilation of the In-itself; it is like a hole of being at the heart of Being.

I do not give a damn about the dead. They died for the [Communist] Party and the Party can decide what it wants. I practice a live man's politics, for the living.

My eyes feel all soft, all soft as flesh. I'm going to sleep.

In the nineteenth century one had to give all sorts of guarantees and lead an exemplary life in order to cleanse oneself in the eyes of the bourgeois of the sin of writing, for literature is, in essence, heresy. The situation has not changed except that it is now the Communists, that is, the qualified representatives of the proletariat, who as a matter of principle regard the writer as suspect.

For common minds have an ugly ability to perceive in the deepest and richest saying nothing but their own everyday opinion.

Remember, Orestes: you were part of my herd, you grazed in the fields along with my sheep. Your liberty is nothing but a mange eating away at you, it is nothing but an exile.

I believe, I desire, that social and economic ills may be remedied.

I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.

Heroism is not to be won at the point of a pen.

Man is always a wizard to man, and the social world is at first magical.

When my relations with the Communist Party gave me the necessary perspective I decided to write my autobiography. I wanted to show how a man can pass from literature held sacred to action which nevertheless remains that of an intellectual.

What do you want to do with the [Communist] Party? A racing stable? What good is it to sharpen a knife every day if you never useit for slicing? A party is never more than a means. There is only one objective: power.

I had dreamed my life for nearly fifty years (I am about to be fifty-nine). But, you see, there are two tones in Les Mats: the echo of this condemnation and a mitigation of that severity.

You see, the contemporary writer must write through his intimations of unease, while trying to elucidate them.

Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them... there is nothing.

Thrown into the atmosphere of action [in 1954], I suddenly understood the kind of neurosis that dominated all my previous work. I had not been able to recognize it before: I was inside. Simone de Beauvoir had guessed these reasons before I did.

I consider Les Nourritures Terrestres as a frightening book: "Look for God in no other place than everywhere." Go and tell that to a workman, an engineer!

Il n'y a pas d'autre univers qu'un univers humain, l'univers de la subjectivite humaine. There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity.

Perception is naturally surpassed toward action; better yet, it can be revealed only in and through projects of action. The world is revealed as an "always future hollow", for we are always future to ourselves.

To love is never just to love since it is also to will to love, and ... to love in spite of oneself, to allow oneself to be overcome by one's love.

Therefore, in the nature of this will for freedom, which freedom itself implies, I may pass judgement on those who seek to hide from themselves the complete arbitrariness and the complete freedom of their existence.

There is no book of mine that I reject. That does not mean that I find them good.

The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free, Aegistheus. You know it and they do not.

All-powerful god, who am I but the fear that I inspire in others?

This then is the age of reason.

God is the solitude of men. There was only me: I alone decided to commit Evil; alone, I invented Good. I am the one who cheated, I am the one who performed miracles, I am the one accusing myself today, I alone can absolve myself; me, the man.

L'homme est une passion inutile. Man is a useless passion.