Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes
-
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.
-
That is precisely what we should have expected, since Genet wants to live simultaneously creation, destruction, the impossibility of destroying and the impossibility of creating, since he wants both to show his rejection of the divine creation and to manifest, in the absolute, human impotence as man’s reproval of God and as the testimony of his grandeur.
-
As for us, my little friend, we entered the Communist Party because we were tired of dying of hunger.
-
It is too early to love. We will buy the right to do so by shedding blood.
-
I can be twenty women, one hundred, if that’s what you want, all women. Ride with me behind you, I weigh nothing, your horse will not feel me. I want to be your whorehouse!
-
Je suis condamné à être libre.
-
A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.
-
This inner revolution is realistic because it maintains itself deliberately within the framework of existing institutions; the oppressed reckon with the real situation.
-
…the reality of society involves the socialization of certain unrealities.
-
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.
-
Similarly, individual acts of aristocratic generosity do not eliminate pauperism; they perpetuate it.
-
If we must absolutely mention this state of affairs, I suggest that we call ourselves 'absent', that is more proper.
-
A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.
-
…the prisoner’s dreams is the guard’s spirituality
-
Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.
-
The dreamer must contaminate the others by his dream, he must make them fall into it
-
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.
-
…inversion…is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.
-
…and if you are common, you can dress up as a woman, show you behind or write poems: there’s nothing offensive about a naked behind if it’s everybody’s; each person will be mirrored in it.
-
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.
-
The past is the luxury of proprietors.
-
The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.
-
He chooses the most feared, most hated man in order to worship him as a god, feeling sure that he is alone in perceiving the god’s secret virtues.
-
But when they have realized that it society rejects them forever, they themselves assume the ostracism of which they are victims so as not to leave the initiative to their oppressors