Jean-Paul Sartre

From BillionQuotes

(Redirected from Sartre)

Jump to: navigation, search

Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), French Existentialist philosopher, playwright, and novelist

1 Sourced
2 Attributed
3 Sources
- 3.1 External links

[edit]

Sourced

"He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being."
- L'âge de raison (The Age Of Reason) (1945)

"Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom."
- The Psychology of Imagination, 1948[1]

[edit]

Nausea (1938)

La nausée (Nausea)

"When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell something: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends."
- diary entry of Tuesday, 30 January

"People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?"
- diary entry of Friday (2 February)

"I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates."
- diary entry of Friday (2 February), concerning a card game

"As for the square at Meknes, where I used to go every day, it's even simpler: I do not see it at all anymore. All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words that are indivisibly bound together: a charming square at Meknes. … I don't see anything any more: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction."
- diary entry of Friday 3:00pm (9 February?)

"And we feel that the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations, promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to all that did not herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the man was walking in the night without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of dull rich prizes, and he did not make his choice."
- diary entry of Saturday noon (10 February?)

"I exist. It's sweet, so sweet, so slow..."

"Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do."

"Ma pensée, c'est moi: voilà pourquoi je ne peux pas m'arrêter. J'existe par ce que je pense … et je ne peux pas m'empêcher de penser."
- translation: "My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think … and I can't prevent myself from thinking. (note: "J'existe par ce que je pense" can also be translated into the well known "I think, therefore I am.")
- "Lundi" ("Monday")

[edit]

No Exit (1945)

Huis-clos (No Exit)

"Ah, quelle plaisanterie. Pas besoin de gril, L'Enfer, c'est les Autres."
- translation: "What a joke! No need of a gridiron, Hell is other people."

[edit]

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

"The homosexual never thinks of himself when someone is branded in his presence with the name homosexual. ...His sexual tastes will doubtless lead him to enter into relationships with this suspect category, but he would like to make use of them without being likened to them. Here, too, the ban that is cast on certain men by society has destroyed all possibility of reciprocity among them. Shame isolates."

"I maintain that inversion is the effect of neither a prenatal choice nor an endocrinal malformation nor even the passive and determined result of complexes. It is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating."

[edit]

Being and Nothingness (1943)

L'être et le néant (Being and Nothingness)

"L'existence précède et commande l'essence."
- translation: "Existence precedes and rules essence."
- part 4, chapter 1

"Je suis condamné à être libre."
- translation: "I am condemned to be free."
- part 4, chapter 1

"L'homme est une passion inutile."
- translation: "Man is a useless passion."
- part 4, chapter 2

"Nothingness haunts being."

"Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."

"Life has no meaning a priori … It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose."

"It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish."

[edit]

Attributed

Like a lost lover no one knows how to console. B.T. Larnum

"Like all dreamers, I confuse disenchantment with truth."

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.
-Being and Nothingness, p. 617

Quand les riches se font la guerre, ce sont les pauvres qui meurent.
(When the rich make war, it's the poor that die)

Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind. Existentialism and Humanism pg. 17

To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all. Existentialism and Humanism pg. 17

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. Being and Nothingness pg. 51

So long as a man can look into the eyes of his oppressor, he is free. - Attributed in Me and the Big Guy

[edit]

Sources

Image:Wikipedia.png

Wikipedia has an article about:

Jean-Paul Sartre

Aldrich, Robert and Wotherspoon, Gary (Eds.) (2001). Who's Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History: From World War II to the Present Day. New York: Routledge. ISBN 041522974X.
Knowles, Elizabeth (Ed.) (1999). The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198601735.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1964). Nausea. New York: New Directions Publishing. ISBN 0811201880.

[edit]