Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes
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I, for my part, do not conceive an act as having causes, and I consider myself satisfied when I have found in it not its ‘factors’ but the general themes which it organizes: for our decisions gather into new syntheses and on new occasions the leitmotif that governs our life
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Admit it, it is your youth that you regret, more even than your crime; it is my youth you hate, even more than my innocence.
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Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away.... To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.
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If we must absolutely mention this state of affairs, I suggest that we call ourselves 'absent', that is more proper.
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The past is the luxury of proprietors.
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Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.
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I entered the Communist Party because its cause was just and I will leave it when it ceases to be just.
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If only you knew how little I care. Cowardly or not, as long as he is a good kisser.
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Suppose that I wish to deserve the title of 'robber of remorse' and that I place in myself all the townspeople’s repentence?
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On est ce qu'on veut.
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It is too early to love. We will buy the right to do so by shedding blood.
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But since he has decided to have the impossibility of living, every misfortune is an opportunity which lays this importance of living before his eyes and obliges him to decide, once again, to die.
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A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.
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I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.
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Her face seems ravaged by both lightning and hail. But on yours there is something like the promise of a storm: one day passion will burn it to the bone.
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The live dead-man is dead as a producer and alive insofar as he consumes
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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.
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The strangest mores of the most of-the-way societies will, in spite of everything, be relatively comprehensible to the person who has a flesh-and-blood knowledge of man’s needs, anxieties, and hopes. If, on the other hand, this experience is lacking, he will not even be able to understand the customs of those about him.
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In some places the metropolis makes do with paying a clique of feudal overlords; in others, it has fabricated a fake bourgeoisie of colonized subjects in a system of divide and rule; elsewhere, it has killed two birds with one stone: the colony is both settlement and exploitation.
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…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.
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All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
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You take souls for vegetables.... The gardener can decide what will become of his carrots but no one can choose the good of others for them.
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…inversion…is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.
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I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.