Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes
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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?
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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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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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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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Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
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Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
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L'homme est une passion inutile.
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I will take it all: tongs, molten lead, prongs, garrotes, all that burns, all that tears, I want to truly suffer. Better one hundred bites, better the whip, vitriol, than this suffering in the head, this ghost of suffering which grazes and caresses and never hurts enough.
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We were too light, Electra. Now our feet press down in the earth like the wheels of a cart in its groove. Come with me, and we will walk heavily, bending under the weight of our heavy load.
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I will not be modest. Humble, as much as you like, but not modest. Modesty is the virtue of the lukewarm.
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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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Catherine: Why commit Evil?Goetz: Because Good has already been done.Catherine: Who has done it?Goetz: God the Father. I, on the other hand, am improvising.
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It is freedom, it is particularity, it is solitude that we are aiming at, and not Evil for its own sake
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I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.
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To eat is to appropriate by destruction.
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Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.
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I am a man, Jupiter, and each man must invent his own path.
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'Everything is both a trap and a display; the secret reality of the object is what the Other makes of it.'
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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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Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.
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such mad confidence within despair.
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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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The live dead-man is dead as a producer and alive insofar as he consumes
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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.