Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

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.

It is no good putting yourself in the dead man's shoes, pretending to share his passions, his blunders, and his prejudices, reawakening vanished moments of strength, impatience, or apprehension; you cannot help assessing his behaviour in light of results which he could not foresee and of information which he did not possess, or attributing a particular solemnity to events whose effects marked him later, but which he lived through casually. That is the mirage: the future is more real than the present. It is not surprising: in a completed life, the end is taken as the truth of the beginning. The dead man stands half-way between being and worth, between the crude fact and its reconstruction: his history becomes a kind of circular essence which is summed up in each of his moments.

If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light.

Nothingness haunts being.

And the concert halls overflow with humiliated, outraged people who close their eyes and try to turn their pale faces into receiving antennæ. They imagine that the sounds flow into them, sweet, nourishing, and that their sufferings become music, like Werther; they think that beauty is compassionate to them. Mugs. I

من می‌دانم که خوبی دشوارتر از بدی است. بدی فقط وابسته به من بود، درصورتی‌که خوبی وابسته به همه است.

An individual chooses and makes himself.

She suffers as a miser. She must be miserly with her pleasures, as well. I wonder if sometimes she doesn't wish she were free of this monotonous sorrow, of these mutterings which start as soon as she stops singing, if she doesn't wish to suffer once and for all, to drown herself in despair. In any case, it would be impossible for her: she is bound.

En la pared hay un agujero blanco, el espejo. Es una trampa. Sé que voy a dejarme atrapar. Ya está. La cosa gris acaba de aparecer en el espejo. Me acerco y la miro; ya no puedo irme. Es el reflejo de mi rostro. A menudo en estos días perdidos, me quedo contemplándolo. No comprendo nada en este rostro. Los de los otros tienen un sentido. El mío, no. Ni siquiera puedo decidir si es lindo o feo. Pienso que es feo, porque me lo han dicho. Pero no me sorprende. En el fondo, a mí mismo me choca que puedan atribuirle cualidades de ese tipo, como si llamaran lindo o feo a un montón de tierra o a un bloque de piedra.

Je ne suis rien que le regard qui te voit, que cette pensée incolore qui te pense.

When she is alone in the rooms I hear her humming to keep herself from thinking.

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.

Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.

This is the contradiction of racism, colonialism, and all forms of tyranny: in order to treat a man like a dog, one must first recognize him as a man.

The function of a writer is to call a spade a spade. If words are sick, it is up to us to cure them. Instead of that, many writers live off this sickness. In many cases modern literature is a cancer of words. ... There is nothing more deplorable than the literary practice which, I believe, is called poetic prose and which consists of using words for the obscure harmonics which reosund about them and which are made up of vague meanings which are in contradiction with the clear meaning. .... That is not all: we are living in an age of mystifications. Some are fundamental ones which are due to the structure of society; some are secondary. At any rate, the social order today rests upon the mystification of consciousness, as does disorder as well.