-
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
Jean-Paul Sartre -
The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure nihilation of the In-itself; it is like a hole of being at the heart of Being.
Jean-Paul Sartre
-
Alors, c’est ça l’enfer. Je n'aurais jamais cru... vous vous rappelez: le soufre, le bûcher, le gril... ah! Quelle plaisanterie. Pas besoin de gril, l'enfer, c'est les autres.
Jean-Paul Sartre -
Since he is unable to be the beloved, he will become the lover.
Jean-Paul Sartre -
Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.
Jean-Paul Sartre -
The live dead-man is dead as a producer and alive insofar as he consumes
Jean-Paul Sartre -
I entered the Communist Party because its cause was just and I will leave it when it ceases to be just.
Jean-Paul Sartre -
I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.
Jean-Paul Sartre
-
It is too early to love. We will buy the right to do so by shedding blood.
Jean-Paul Sartre -
A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.
Jean-Paul Sartre -
On est ce qu'on veut.
Jean-Paul Sartre -
Suppose that I wish to deserve the title of 'robber of remorse' and that I place in myself all the townspeople’s repentence?
Jean-Paul Sartre -
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.
Jean-Paul Sartre -
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
Jean-Paul Sartre
-
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.
Jean-Paul Sartre -
The past is the luxury of proprietors.
Jean-Paul Sartre -
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.
Jean-Paul Sartre -
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.
Jean-Paul Sartre -
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.
Jean-Paul Sartre -
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.
Jean-Paul Sartre
-
As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished.
Jean-Paul Sartre -
…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.
Jean-Paul Sartre -
Je suis condamné à être libre.
Jean-Paul Sartre -
…inversion…is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.
Jean-Paul Sartre