Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes
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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.
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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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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.
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For Genet, reflective states of mind are the rule. And although they are of an unstable nature in everyone, in him…reflection is always contrary to the reflected feeling.
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His obedience is real since he really and truly fulfills his mission, since he runs real risks in order to carry out the beloved’s orders. But, on the other hand, it is imaginary because he submits only to a creature of his mind.
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The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.
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Karsky: I met your father last week. Are you still interested in hearing how he is doing?Hugo: No.Karsky: It is very probable that you will be responsible for his death.Hugo: It is virtually certain that he is responsible for my life. We are even.
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What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?
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Don’t you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.
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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.
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Tout existant naît sans raison, se prolonge par faiblesse et meurt par rencontre.
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As for us, my little friend, we entered the Communist Party because we were tired of dying of hunger.
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It is the good children, Madame, who make the most terrible revolutionaries. They say nothing, they do not hide under the table, they eat only one sweet at a time, but later on, they make Society pay dearly for it!
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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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I grasp at each second, trying to suck it dry: nothing happens which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever in myself, nothing, neither the fugitive tenderness of those lovely eyes, nor the noises of the street, nor the false dawn of early morning: and even so the minute passes and I do not hold it back, I like to see it pass.
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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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I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good.
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Genet is a man-failure: he wills the impossible in order to derive from the tragic grandeur of this defeat the assurance that there is something other than the possible.
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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.
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For Genet, Beauty will be the offensive weapon that will enable him to beat the just on their own ground: that of value.
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The consciousness of being betrayed is to the collective consciousness of a sacred group what a certain form of schizophrenia is to the individual…it is a form of madness.
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Man cannot will unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.
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I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.
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Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.