Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes
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I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.
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We will not go to Heaven,Goetz, and even if we both entered it, we would not have eyes to see each other, nor hands to touch each other. Up there, God gets all the attention.... We can only love on this earth and against God.
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It was a constraint; he makes of it his mission
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I am a man, Jupiter, and each man must invent his own path.
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...man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.
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Now I am weary and I can no longer tell good from Evil, and I need someone to show me the way.
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Jupiter: I am not your king, impudent larva? Who then has created you?Orestes: You. But you should not have created me free.
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With despair, true optimism begins: the optimism of the man who expects nothing, who knows he has no rights and nothing coming to him, who rejoices in counting on himself alone and in acting alone for the good of all.
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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.
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Dostoevsky once wrote: 'If God did not exist, everything would be permitted'; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse.
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…in order to change poverty into wealth, one must start by displaying it.
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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.
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You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.
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If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.
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Nicias, do you think you can erase with good deeds the wrongs you committed against your mother? What good deed will ever reach her? Her soul is a scorching noon time, without a single breath of a breeze, nothing moves, nothing changes, nothing lives there; a great emaciated sun, an immobile sun eternally consumes her.
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I felt less alone when I didn’t know you yet: I was waiting for the other. I thought only of his strength and never of my weakness. And now here you are, Orestes, it was you. I look at you and I see that we are two orphans.
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As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.
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I wanted for the moments in my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. It would be just as well to try to catch time by the tail.
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Monsieur … I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.
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His business is here, it is here that he is despised and vilified, it is here that he must carry out his undertaking.
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I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.
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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.
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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.
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To eat is to appropriate by destruction.