Top 466 Quotes & Sayings by Jean-Paul Sartre - Page 8

Ah! How I hate the crimes of the new generation: they are dry and sterile as darnel.

Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom-ah the soul-destroying boredom-of long days of mild content.

Everything in my past, in my training, everything that has been most essential in my activity up to now has made me above all a man who writes, and it is too late for that to change.

If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light.

I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it. I know I'll never jump again.

All the same, they [books] do serve some purpose. Culture doesn't save anything or anyone, it doesn't justify. But it's a product of man: he projects himself into it, he recognizes himself in it; that critical mirror alone offers him his image.

Criminals together. We're in hell, my little friend, and there's never any mistake there. People are not damned for nothing.

Man exists, turns up, appears on the scene and only afterwards, defines himself

It is the same: a chosen one is a man whom God's finger crushes against the wall.

But for me there is neither Monday nor Sunday: there are days which pass in disorder, and then, sudden lightning like this one. Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I can't describe it, it's like the Nausea and yet it's just the opposite: at last an adventure happens to me and when I question myself I see that it happens that I am myself and that I am here; I am the one who splits in the night, I am as happy as the hero of a novel.

I had been playing with matches and burned a small rug. I was in the process of covering up my crime when suddenly God saw me. I felt His gaze inside my head and on my hands....I flew into a rage against so crude an indiscretion, I blasphemed....He never looked at me again....I had the more difficulty getting rid of Him the Holy Ghost in that He had installed Himself at the back of my head....I collared the Holy Ghost in the cellar and threw Him out.

Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not. He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to recover his inner being.

My pessimism has never been flabby.

The status of 'native' is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent.

This [service to oppressed] is the writer's task, and, if he fulfills it as he should, he acquires no merit from it.

I think [Alain Robbe-Grillet] a good writer, but he speaks to the comfortable bourgeoisie.

I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.

In the state I was in, if someone had come and told me I could go home quietly, that they would leave me my life whole, it would have left me cold: several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.

Aegistheus, the kings have another secret.... Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the Gods can do nothing against that man. It is a matter for men to handle amongst themselves, and it is up to other men and to them alone to let him flee or to destroy him.

Understand me: I wish to be a man from somewhere, a man among men. You see, a slave, when he passes by, weary and surly, carrying a heavy load, limping along and looking down at his feet, only at his feet to avoid falling down; he is in his town, like a leaf in greenery, like a tree in a forest, argos surrounds him, heavy and warm, full of herself; I want to be that slave, Electra, I want to pull the city around me and to roll myself up in it like a blanket. I will not leave.

The past is the luxury of proprietors.

The way, applicable in our non-revolutionary societies, to prepare for the time when everyone will read, is to pose problems in the most radical and intransigent manner. This is what Alain Badiou has just done in Almagestes, where he puts language on trial with an intention of cleansing, of catharsis.

Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.

Besides one should not believe that the people only want reading that is easy to absorb.

I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence

At that time [1954], as a result of political events, I was deeply preoccupied by my relations with the Communist Party.

I don't know. Everything. Living. Smoking.

What I lacked [in La Nausee] was a sense of reality. I have changed since. I have slowly learned to experience reality.

The recent experiences of pocketbooks prove this. I have changed my public since my works have been published in a smaller format.

I should wish [Alain Robbe-Grillet] to realize that Guinea exists.

A good hanging now and then -- that entertains folk in the provinces and robs death of its glamour.

Some men are born committed to action: they do not have a choice, they have been thrown on a path, at the end of that path, an act awaits them, their act.

I am a man, Jupiter, and each man must invent his own path.

Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up; I forget them almost immediately.

The form [of literature] matters little to me, classical or not.

I know only one Church: it is the society of men.

I receive letters from workers, from secretaries. . . . They are the most interesting ones.

With a little luck that epoch may arrive. I am on the side of those who think that things will go better when the world has changed.

I enjoy feeling fastidious and aloof. I enjoy saying no, always no, and I should be afraid of any attempt to construct a finally habitable world, because I should merely have to say - Yes; and act like other people.

[Contemporary writer] could be a kind of [Samuel] Beckett who would not be felt to be totally committed to despair.

The appearance of the other in the world corresponds therefore to a congealed sliding of the whole universe.

Either the USSR was not the country of socialism, in which case socialism didn't exist anywhere and doubtless, wasn't possible: or else, socialism was that, this abominable monster, this police state, the power of beasts of prey.

Generally speaking there is no irreducible taste or inclination. They all represent a certain appropriative choice of being. It is up to existential psychoanalysis to compare and classify them. Ontology abandons us here; it has merely enabled us to determine the ultimate ends of human reality, its fundamental possibilities, and the value which haunts it.

Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the gods can do nothing against that man.

Lord, you have cursed Cain and Cain’s children: thy will be done. You have allowed men’s hearts to be corrupted, that their intentions be rotten, that their actions putrefy and stink: thy will be done.

Little flashes of sun on the surface of a cold, dark sea.