Background Image

...

Absurd, Irreducible; Nothing — Not Even A Profound And Secret Delirium Of Nature — Could Explain It. Obviously I Did Not Know Everything, I Had Not Seen The Seeds Sprout, Or The Tree Grow. But Faced With This Great Wrinkled Paw, Neither Ignorance Nor Knowledge Was Important: The World Of Explanations And Reasons Is Not The World Of Existence. A Circle Is Not Absurd, It Is Clearly Explained By The Rotation Of A Straight Segment Around One Of Its Extremities. But Neither Does A Circle Exist. This Root, On The Other Hand, Existed In Such A Way That I Could Not Explain It.

-Jean-Paul Sartre

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Absurd, Irreducible; Nothing —

Jean-Paul Sartre

...

Absurd, Irreducible; Nothing — Not Even A Profound And Secret Delirium Of Nature — Could Explain It. Obviously I Did Not Know Everything, I Had Not Seen The Seeds Sprout, Or The Tree Grow. But Faced With This Great Wrinkled Paw, Neither Ignorance Nor Knowledge Was Important: The World Of Explanations And Reasons Is Not The World Of Existence. A Circle Is Not Absurd, It Is Clearly Explained By The Rotation Of A Straight Segment Around One Of Its Extremities. But Neither Does A Circle Exist. This Root, On The Other Hand, Existed In Such A Way That I Could Not Explain It.

Views: 6

Topic

More From Jean-Paul Sartre

Don't You Feel The Same Way? When I Cannot See Myself, Even Though I Touch Myself, I Wonder If I Really Exist.

He Walked On In Silence, The Solitary Sound Of His Footsteps Echoing In His Head, As In A Deserted Street, At Dawn. His Solitude Was So Complete, Beneath A Lovely Sky As Mellow And Serene As A Good Conscience, Amid That Busy Throng, That He Was Amazed At His Own Existence; He Must Be Somebody Else's Nightmare, And Whoever It Was Would Certainly Awaken Soon.

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.

No Finite Point Has Meaning Without An Infinite Reference Point.

Handing Over A Bank Note Is Enough To Make A Bicycle Belong To Me, But My Entire Life Is Needed To Realize This Possession.

Night Is Falling: At Dusk, You Must Have Good Eyesight To Be Able To Tell The Good Lord From The Devil.

I Distrust The Incommunicable; It Is The Source Of All Violence

Some Of These Days, Oh, You'll Miss Me Honey

Everything In My Past, In My Training, Everything That Has Been Most Essential In My Activity Up To Now Has Made Me Above All A Man Who Writes, And It Is Too Late For That To Change.

I Do Not Give A Damn About The Dead. They Died For The [communist] Party And The Party Can Decide What It Wants. I Practice A Live Man's Politics, For The Living.

Better To Have Beasts That Let Themselves Be Killed Than Men Who Run Away.

In The State I Was In, If Someone Had Come And Told Me I Could Go Home Quietly, That They Would Leave Me My Life Whole, It Would Have Left Me Cold: Several Hours Or Several Years Of Waiting Is All The Same When You Have Lost The Illusion Of Being Eternal.

Existence Is Prior To Essence.

Because The Nazi Venom Worked Its Way Even Into Our Thoughts, Every Accurate Thought Was A Conquest; Because An All-powerful Police Sought To Force Us Into Silence Every Word Became As Precious As A Declaration Of Principle; Because We Were Persecuted, Each Of Our Gestures Carried The Weight Of A Commitment.

What's Done At Night Belongs To The Night. In The Daytime You Don't Talk About It.

There Is No Love Apart From The Deeds Of Love; No Potentiality Of Love Other Than That Which Is Manifested In Loving.

Some Men Are Born Committed To Action: They Do Not Have A Choice, They Have Been Thrown On A Path, At The End Of That Path, An Act Awaits Them, Their Act.

A Man Is Always A Teller Of Tales, He Lives Surrounded By His Stories And The Stories Of Others, He Sees Everything That Happens To Him Through Them; And He Tries To Live His Life As If He Were Recounting It.

And I Too Wanted To Be. That Is All I Wanted; And This Is The Last Word. At The Bottom Of All These Attempts Which Seemed Without Bounds, I Find The Same Desire Again: To Drive Existence Out Of Me, To Rid The Passing Moments Of Their Fat, To Twist Them, Dry Them, Purify Myself, Harden Myself, To Give Back At Last The Sharp, Precise Sound Of A Saxophone Note. That Could Even Make An Apologue: There Was A Poor Man Who Got In The Wrong World.

For An Occurrence To Become An Adventure, It Is Necessary And Sufficient For One To Recount It.

I Had Spent My Time Counterfeiting Eternity.

I Grow Warm, I Begin To Feel Happy. There Is Nothing Extraordinary In This, It Is A Small Happiness Of Nausea: It Spreads At The Bottom Of The Viscous Puddle, At The Bottom Of Out Time - The Time Of Purple Suspenders, And Broken Chair Seats; It Is Made Of White, Soft Instants, Spreading At The Edge, Like An Oil Stain. No Sooner Than Born, It Is Already Old, It Seems As Though I Have Known It For Twenty Years.

First All Men Must Be Able To Become Men By The Improvement Of Their Conditions Of Existence, So That A Universal Morality Can Be Created. If I Begin By Saying To Them: "thou Shalt Not Lie," There Is No Longer Any Possibility Of Political Action. What Matters First Is The Liberation Of Man.

A Madman's Ravings Are Absurd In Relation To The Situation In Which He Finds Himself, But Not In Relation To His Madness.

Do You Think I Can Read [alain] Robbe-grillet In An Underdeveloped Country? He Does Not Feel Himself Maimed.

When One Loves Animals And Children Too Much, One Loves Them Against Human Beings.

It Is Not Right, My Fellow-countrymen, You Who Know Very Well All The Crimes Committed In Our Name. It's Not At All Right That You Do Not Breathe A Word About Them To Anyone, Not Even To Your Own Soul, For Fear Of Having To Stand In Judgment Of Yourself. I Am Willing To Believe That At The Beginning You Did Not Realize What Was Happening; Later, You Doubted Whether Such Things Could Be True; But Now You Know, And Still You Hold Your Tongues.

He Who Asks A Question Is A Fool For A Minute; He Who Does Not Remains A Fool Forever. When You Realize That By Changing Your Perspective, Big Things Can Be Seen As Little Things, It Becomes Much Harder To Worry About Anything. Commitment Is An Act, Not A Word.

What Never Vary Are The Necessities Of Being In The World, Of Having To Labor And To Die There.

We Do Not Know What We Want And Yet We Are Responsible For What We Are - That Is The Fact.

It Is The Same: A Chosen One Is A Man Whom God's Finger Crushes Against The Wall.

When I Can't See Myself In The Mirror, I Can't Even Feel Myself, And I Begin To Wonder If I Exist At All.

So Much Torture, Bloodshed, Deceit. You Cannot Make Your Young People Practice Torture Twenty-four Hours A Day And Not Expect To Pay A Price For It.

Man Is Not The Sum Of What He Has Already, But Rather The Sum Of What He Does Not Yet Have, Of What He Could Have.

Being Is. Being Is In-itself. Being Is What It Is.

Meaning Of Life

I Was A Neophyte In Another World [in 1954].

I Have No Religion, But If I Were To Choose One, It Would Be That Of Shariati's.

I Found The Human Heart Empty And Insipid Everywhere Except In Books.

I Will Take It All: Tongs, Molten Lead, Prongs, Garrotes, All That Burns, All That Tears, I Want To Truly Suffer. Better One Hundred Bites, Better The Whip, Vitriol, Than This Suffering In The Head, This Ghost Of Suffering Which Grazes And Caresses And Never Hurts Enough.

I Had Found My Religion: Nothing Seemed More Important To Me Than A Book. I Saw The Library As A Temple.

What I Ask Of [the Writer] Is Not To Ignore The Reality And The Fundamental Problems That Exist. The World's Hunger, The Atomic Threat, The Alienation Of Man, I Am Astonished That They Do Not Color All Our Literature.

Nothingness Lies Coiled In The Heart Of Being - Like A Worm.

Little Flashes Of Sun On The Surface Of A Cold, Dark Sea.

It’s The Well-behaved Children That Make The Most Formidable Revolutionaries. They Don’t Say A Word, They Don’t Hide Under The Table, They Eat Only One Piece Of Chocolate At A Time. But Later On, They Make Society Pay Dearly.

I Exist, That Is All, And I Find It Nauseating.

Smooth And Smiling Faces Everywhere, But Ruin In Their Eyes.

The Characteristic Of Every Neurosis Is To Represent Itself As Natural.

Characteristics

Through The Lack Of Attaching Myself To Words, My Thoughts Remain Nebulous Most Of The Time. They Sketch Vague, Pleasant Shapes And Then Are Swallowed Up; I Forget Them Almost Immediately.

The Coward Makes Himself Cowardly, The Hero Makes Himself Heroic.

What Do We Mean By Saying That Existence Precedes Essence? We Mean That Man First Of All Exists, Encounters Himself, Surges Up In The World-and Defines Himself Afterward.

We Are Our Choices.

To Keep Hope Alive One Must, In Spite Of All Mistakes, Horrors, And Crimes, Recognize The Obvious Superiority Of The Socialist Camp.

You Must Be Afraid, My Son. That Is How One Becomes An Honest Citizen.

In Order To Make Myself Recognized By The Other, I Must Risk My Own Life. To Risk One's Life, In Fact, Is To Reveal Oneself As Not-bound To The Objective Form Or To Any Determined Existence — As Not-bound To Life.

I Wanted My Own Words. But The Ones I Use Have Dragged Through I Don't Know How Many Consciences.

If You Want To Deserve Hell, You Need Only Stay In Bed. The World Is Iniquity; If You Accept It, You Are An Accomplice, If You Change It You Are An Executioner.

I Think Of Death Only With Tranquility, As An End. I Refuse To Let Death Hamper Life. Death Must Enter Life Only To Define It.

Is There Really Nothing, Nothing Left Of Me?

[lost Of The Absolute] Is In This Sense That ''i No Longer Know What To Do With My Life" Must Be Understood. Critics Have Been Mistaken About The Meaning Of This Phrase, Seeing In It A Cry Of Despair As In Simone De Beauvoir's "i Have Been Cheated." When She Uses This Word It Is To Indicate That She Claims From Life An Absolute Which She Cannot Find There.

I'd Come To Realize That All Our Troubles Spring From Our Failure To Use Plain, Clear-cut Language.

My Thought Is Me: That's Why I Can't Stop. I Exist Because I Think… And I Can't Stop Myself From Thinking. At This Very Moment - It's Frightful - If I Exist, It Is Because I Am Horrified At Existing. I Am The One Who Pulls Myself From The Nothingness To Which I Aspire.

At Times Discreetly, At Times Disgustingly, I Yielded To The Most Fatal Temptation Whenever I Could No Longer Bear It: As A Result Of Impatience, Orpheus Lost Eurydice; As A Result Of Impatience, I Lost Myself.

I Do Not Believe In God; His Existence Has Been Disproved By Science. But In The Concentration Camp, I Learned To Believe In Men.

It Is Meaningless That We Are Born, It Is Meaningless That We Die.

Freedom Is Existence, And In It Existence Precedes Essence.

What Is Not Possible Is Not To Choose.

Who Can Exhaust A Man? Who Knows A Man's Resources?

He Loves Me, He Doesn't Love My Bowels, If They Showed Him My Appendix In A Glass He Wouldn't Recognize It, He's Always Feeling Me, But If They Put The Glass In His Hands He Wouldn't Touch It, He Wouldn't Think, "that's Hers," You Ought To Love All Of Somebody, The Esophagus, The Liver, The Intestines. Maybe We Don't Love Them Because We Aren't Used To Them, But If We Saw Them The Way We Saw Our Hands And Arms Maybe We'd Love Them; The Starfish Must Love Each Other Better Than We Do.

To Think New Thoughts You Have To Break The Bones In Your Head

I Committed The First Crime By Creating Men As Mortals. After That, What More Could You Do, You The Murderers? Come On; They Already Had Death In Them: At Most You Simply Hastened Things A Little.

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.

You Are -- Your Life, And Nothing Else.

If You Are Lonely When You're Alone, You Are In Bad Company.

If A Jew Is Fascinated By Christians It Is Not Because Of Their Virtues, Which He Values Little, But Because They Represent Anonymity, Humanity Without Race.

The Consciousness That Says 'i Am' Is Not The Consciousness That Thinks.

The Individual's Duty Is To Do What He Wants To Do, To Think Whatever He Likes, To Be Accountable To No One But Himself, To Challenge Every Idea And Every Person.

A Writer Must Refuse To Allow Himself To Be Transformed Into An Institution.

This [service To Oppressed] Is The Writer's Task, And, If He Fulfills It As He Should, He Acquires No Merit From It.

Once We Know And Are Aware, We Are Responsible For Our Action And Our Inaction. We Can Do Something About It Or Ignore It. Either Way, We Are Still Responsible.

This Is What I Thought: For The Most Banal Even To Become An Adventure, You Must (and This Is Enough) Begin To Recount It. This Is What Fools People: A Man Is Always A Teller Of Tales, He Sees Everything That Happens To Him Through Them; And He Tries To Live His Own Life As If He Were Telling A Story. But You Have To Choose: Live Or Tell.

Introspection Is Always Retrospection

Lord, You Have Cursed Cain And Cain’s Children: Thy Will Be Done. You Have Allowed Men’s Hearts To Be Corrupted, That Their Intentions Be Rotten, That Their Actions Putrefy And Stink: Thy Will Be Done.

Things Are Entirely What They Appear To Be And Behind Them... There Is Nothing.

I'm Going To Smile, And My Smile Will Sink Down Into Your Pupils, And Heaven Knows What It Will Become.

So It Comes To This; One Doesn’t Need Rest. Why Bother About Sleep If One Isn’t Sleepy? That Stands To Reason, Doesn’t It? Wait A Minute, There’s A Snag Somewhere; Something Disagreeable. Why, Now, Should It Be Disagreeable? …ah, I See; It’s Life Without A Break.

It Is Too Early To Love. We Will Buy The Right To Do So By Shedding Blood.

To Read A Poem In January Is As Lovely As To Go For A Walk In June

A Writer Must Refuse To Allow Himself To Be Transformed Into An Institution, Even If It Takes Place In The Most Honorable Form.

Several Hours Or Several Years Make No Difference Once You Have Lost Eternity.

Perhaps Its Inevitable, Perhaps One Has To Choose Between Being Nothing At All And Impersonating What One Is.

I Say A Murder Is Abstract. You Pull The Trigger And After That You Do Not Understand Anything That Happens.

When Rich People Fight Wars With One Another, Poor People Are The Ones To Die.

Torture Is Senseless Violence, Born In Fear... Torture Costs Human Lives But Does Not Save Them. We Would Almost Be Too Lucky If These Crimes Were The Work Of Savages: The Truth Is That Torture Makes Torturers.

What I Regretted In La Nausee Was Not To Have Put Myself Completely Into The Thing. I Remained Outside My Hero's Disease, Protected By My Neurosis Which, Through Writing, Gave Me Happiness.

Existence Is Not Something Which Lets Itself Be Thought Of Form A Distance; It Must Invade You Suddenly, Master You, Weigh Heavily On Your Heart Like A Great Motionless Beast - Or Else There Is Nothing At All.

In Wanting Freedom We Discover That It Depends Entirely On The Freedom Of Others, And That The Freedom Of Others Depends On Ours. . . I Am Obliged To Want Others To Have Freedom At The Same Time That I Want My Own Freedom. I Can Take Freedom As My Goal Only If I Take That Of Others As A Goal As Well.

The Existentialist Says At Once That Man Is Anguish.

Man Can Will Nothing Unless He Has First Understood That He Must Count On No One But Himself.

So That Is What Hell Is. I Would Never Have Believed It. You Remember: The Fire And Brimstone, The Torture. Ah! The Farce. There Is No Need For Torture: Hell Is Other People.

Ha! To Forget. How Childish! I Feel You In My Bones. Your Silence Screams In My Ears. You May Nail Your Mouth Shut, You May Cut Out Your Tongue, Can You Keep Yourself From Existing? Will You Stop Your Thoughts.

A Lost Battle Is A Battle One Thinks One Has Lost.

Atheism Is A Cruel Long Term Business, And I Have Gone Through It To The End.

Man Is Always A Wizard To Man, And The Social World Is At First Magical.

I Am Not Virtuous. Our Sons Will Be If We Shed Enough Blood To Give Them The Right To Be.

My Pessimism Has Never Been Flabby.

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.

I Am Myself And I Am Here.

What I See Is Teeming Cohesion, Contained Dispersal... For Him, To Sculpt Is To Take The Fat Off Space.

You See, I'm Fond Of Teasing, It's A Second Nature With Me—and I'm Used To Teasing Myself. Plaguing Myself, If You Prefer; I Don't Tease Nicely.

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.

One Cannot Become A Saint When One Works Sixteen Hours A Day.

I Am Alone In The Midst Of These Happy, Reasonable Voices. All These Creatures Spend Their Time Explaining, Realizing Happily That They Agree With Each Other. In Heaven's Name, Why Is It So Important To Think The Same Things All Together.

A Soviet Citizen, An Official Writer, Once Said To Me: "the Day When Communism (that Is, Well-being For Everyone) Reigns, Man's Tragedy Will Begin: His Finitude."

The Public, Too, Has To Make An Effort In Order To Understand The Writer Who, Though He Renounce Complacent Obscurity, Cannot Always Express His New-hidden Thoughts Lucidly And According To Accepted Models.

Man Can Will Nothing Unless He Has First Understood That He Must Count On No One But Himself; That He Is Alone, Abandoned On Earth In The Midst Of His Infinite Responsibilities, Without Help, With No Other Aim Than The One He Sets Himself, With No Other Destiny Than The One He Forges For Himself On This Earth.

Every Age Has Its Own Poetry; In Every Age The Circumstances Of History Choose A Nation, A Race, A Class To Take Up The Torch By Creating Situations That Can Be Expressed Or Transcended Only Through Poetry.

I Believe, I Desire, That Social And Economic Ills May Be Remedied.

Existence Precedes And Rules Essence.

You Know How Much I Admire Che Guevara. In Fact, I Believe That The Man Was Not Only An Intellectual But Also The Most Complete Human Being Of Our Age: As A Fighter And As A Man, As A Theoretician Who Was Able To Further The Cause Of Revolution By Drawing His Theories From His Personal Experience In Battle.

Respectable Society Believed In God In Order To Avoid Having To Speak About Him.

When My Relations With The Communist Party Gave Me The Necessary Perspective I Decided To Write My Autobiography. I Wanted To Show How A Man Can Pass From Literature Held Sacred To Action Which Nevertheless Remains That Of An Intellectual.

But [your Crime] Will Be There, One Hundred Times Denied, Always There, Dragging Itself Behind You. Then You Will Finally Know That You Have Committed Your Life With One Throw Of The Die, Once And For All, And There Is Nothing You Can Do But Tug Our Crime Along Until Your Death. Such Is The Law, Just And Unjust, Of Repentance. Then We Will See What Will Become Of Your Young Pride.

Our Responsibility Is Much Greater Than We Might Have Supposed, Because It Involves All Mankind.

Only The Guy Who Isn't Rowing Has Time To Rock The Boat.

There Are Two Ways Of Destroying A People. Either Condemn Them En Bloc Or Force Them To Repudiate The Leaders They Adopted. The Second Is The Worse.

In Any Case, If You Ever Leave Me With A Handsome Man, Do Not Tell Me That You Trust Me Because, Let Me Warn You: That Is Not What Will Prevent Me From Deceiving You, If I Want To. On The Contrary.

As Long As The Writer Cannot Write For The Two Billion Men Who Are Hungry, He Will Be Oppressed By A Feeling Of Malaise.

Acting Is A Question Of Absorbing Other People's Personalities And Adding Some Of Your Own Experience.

Three O'clock Is Always Too Late Or Too Early For Anything You Want To Do.

We Are Possessed By The Things We Possess. When I Like An Object, I Always Give It To Someone. It Isn't Generosity-it's Only Because I Want Others To Be Enslaved By Objects, Not Me.

The Sun Is Not Ridiculous, Quite The Contrary. On Everything I Like, On The Rust Of The Construction Girders, On The Rotten Boards Of The Fence, A Miserly, Uncertain Light Falls, Like The Look You Give, After A Sleepless Night, On Decisions Made With Enthusiasm The Day Before, On Pages You Have Written In One Spurt Without Crossing Out A Word.

Life Is A Useless Passion.

There Are Two Types Of Poor People, Those Who Are Poor Together And Those Who Are Poor Alone. The First Are The True Poor, The Others Are Rich People Out Of Luck.

Uncalled-for Aggression Arouses The Hatred Of The Civilian Population.

When You Live Alone You No Longer Know What It Is To Tell A Story: The Plausible Disappears At The Same Time As The Friends. You Let Events Flow By Too: You Suddenly See People Appear Who Speak And Then Go Away; You Plunge Into Stories Of Which You Can't Make Head Or Tail: You'd Make A Terrible Witness.

You Must Be Like Me; You Must Suffer In Rhythm.

We Do Not Judge The People We Love.

To Believe Is To Know You Believe, And To Know You Believe Is Not To Believe.

I Am Not Recommending "popular" Literature Which Aims At The Lowest.

Popular Literature

I Was Not The One To Invent Lies: They Were Created In A Society Divided By Class And Each Of Us Inherited Lies When We Were Born. It Is Not By Refusing To Lie That We Will Abolish Lies: It Is By Eradicating Class By Any Means Necessary.

There Is Only One Day Left, Always Starting Over: It Is Given To Us At Dawn And Taken Away From Us At Dusk.

Nothing Happens While You Live. The Scenery Changes, People Come In And Go Out, That's All. There Are No Beginnings. Days Are Tacked On To Days Without Rhyme Or Reason, An Interminable, Monotonous Addition.

I Have Crossed The Seas, I Have Left Cities Behind Me, And I Have Followed The Source Of Rivers Towards Their Source Or Plunged Into Forests, Always Making For Other Cities. I Have Had Women, I Have Fought With Men ; And I Could Never Turn Back Any More Than A Record Can Spin In Reverse. And All That Was Leading Me Where ? To This Very Moment.

I Confused Things With Their Names: That Is Belief.

A Good Hanging Now And Then -- That Entertains Folk In The Provinces And Robs Death Of Its Glamour.

Words Are More Treacherous And Powerful Than We Think.

She Believed In Nothing; Only Her Skepticism Kept Her From Being An Atheist.

Generally Speaking There Is No Irreducible Taste Or Inclination. They All Represent A Certain Appropriative Choice Of Being. It Is Up To Existential Psychoanalysis To Compare And Classify Them. Ontology Abandons Us Here; It Has Merely Enabled Us To Determine The Ultimate Ends Of Human Reality, Its Fundamental Possibilities, And The Value Which Haunts It.

God Is Dead. Let Us Not Understand By This That He Does Not Exist Or Even That He No Longer Exists. He Is Dead. He Spoke To Us And Is Silent. We No Longer Have Anything But His Cadaver. Perhaps He Slipped Out Of The World, Somewhere Else Like The Soul Of A Dead Man. Perhaps He Was Only A Dream...god Is Dead.

One Can Ask Why The I Has To Appear In The Cogito {descartes’ Argument “i Think Therefore I Am.}, Since The Cogito, If Used Rightly, Is The Awareness Of Pure Consciousness, Not Directed At Any Fact Or Action. In Fact The I Is Not Necessary Here, Since It Is Never United Directly To Consciousness. One Can Even Imagine A Pure And Self-aware Consciousness Which Thinks Of Itself As Impersonal Spontaneity.

I Said To Myself, 'i Want To Die Decently'.

Freedom Is What You Do With What's Been Done To You.

What The Painter Adds To The Canvas Are The Days Of His Life. The Adventure Of Living, Hurtling Toward Death.

Acting Is Happy Agony.

L'homme Est Condamne A' E" Tre Libre. Man Is Condemned To Be Free.

Everything Comes To Us From Others. To Be Is To Belong To Someone.

I Am Alone In This White, Garden-rimmed Street. Alone And Free. But This Freedom Is Rather Like Death.

I Suppose It Is Out Of Laziness That The World Is The Same Day After Day. Today It Seemed To Want To Change. And Then Anything, Anything Could Happen.

Every Word Has Consequences. Every Silence, Too.

A Pale Reflection Of Myself Wavers In My Consciousness...and Suddenly The “i” Pales, Pales, And Fades Out.

Ideas Come In Pairs And They Contradict One Another; Their Opposition Is The Principal Engine Of Reflection.

Thus It Amounts To The Same Thing Whether One Gets Drunk Alone Or Is A Leader Of Nations.

Man Is What He Wills Himself To Be.

Man Is Nothing Else But What He Makes Of Himself.

I Am Responsible For Everything... Except My Very Responsibility.

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.

When We Love Animals And Children Too Much, We Love Them At The Expense Of Men.

I Am Neither Virgin Nor Priest Enough To Play With The Inner Life.

To Eat Is To Appropriate By Destruction.

As Far As Men Go, It Is Not What They Are That Interests Me, But What They Can Become.

The Viable Jewels Of Life Remain Untouched When Man Forgets His Vocation Of Searching For The Truth Of His Existence.

Hell Is For Other People.

Something Begins In Order To End: An Adventure Doesn't Let Itself Be Extended It Achieves Significance Only Through Its Death.

We Will Freedom For Freedom’s Sake, In And Through Particular Circumstances. And In Thus Willing Freedom, We Discover That It Depends Entirely Upon The Freedom Of Others And That The Freedom Of Others Depends Upon Our Own. Obviously, Freedom As The Definition Of A Man Does Not Depend Upon Others, But As Soon As There Is A Commitment, I Am Obliged To Will The Liberty Of Others At The Same Time As My Own. I Cannot Make Liberty My Aim Unless I Make That Of Others Equally My Aim.

I Respect Orders But I Respect Myself Too And I Do Not Obey Foolish Rules Made Especially To Humiliate Me.

You See, The Contemporary Writer Must Write Through His Intimations Of Unease, While Trying To Elucidate Them.

It Answers The Question That Was Tormenting You: My Love, You Are Not 'one Thing In My Life' - Not Even The Most Important - Because My Life No Longer Belongs To Me Because...you Are Always Me.

It Is Always More Valuable To Report The Truth.

One Always Dies Too Soon Or Too Late. And Yet, Life Is There, Finished: The Line Is Drawn, And It Must All Be Added Up. You Are Nothing Other Than Your Life.

The Worst Part About Being Lied To Is Knowing You Werent Worth The Truth

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.

There May Be More Beautiful Times, But This One Is Ours.

Absurd, Irreducible; Nothing — Not Even A Profound And Secret Delirium Of Nature — Could Explain It. Obviously I Did Not Know Everything, I Had Not Seen The Seeds Sprout, Or The Tree Grow. But Faced With This Great Wrinkled Paw, Neither Ignorance Nor Knowledge Was Important: The World Of Explanations And Reasons Is Not The World Of Existence. A Circle Is Not Absurd, It Is Clearly Explained By The Rotation Of A Straight Segment Around One Of Its Extremities. But Neither Does A Circle Exist. This Root, On The Other Hand, Existed In Such A Way That I Could Not Explain It.

One Does Not Adopt A New Idea, One Slips Into It.

Nothingness Haunts Being.

I Have Such A Desire To Sleep And Am So Much Behind My Sleep. A Good Night, One Good Night And All This Nonsense Will Be Swept Away.

There Is No Human Nature, Since There Is No God To Conceive It.

There Is No God

Time Is Too Large, It Can't Be Filled Up. Everything You Plunge Into It Is Stretched And Disintegrates.

I Do Not Think Therefore I Am A Moustache

The Revolution You Dream Of Is Not Ours. You Don't Want To Change The World; You Want To Blow It Up.

For Common Minds Have An Ugly Ability To Perceive In The Deepest And Richest Saying Nothing But Their Own Everyday Opinion.

Hell Is Other People At Breakfast.

When The Rich [and Politically Powerful] Make War, It's The Poor [and Politically Weak] Who Die.

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.

He Is Always Becoming, And If It Were Not For The Contingency Of Death, He Would Never End.

Once You Hear The Details Of Victory, It Is Hard To Distinguish It From A Defeat.

What Is Meant Here By Saying That Existence Precedes Essence? It Means First Of All, Man Exists, Turns Up, Appears On The Scene, And, Only Afterwards, Defines Himself. If Man, As The Existentialist Conceives Him, Is Indefinable, It Is Because At First He Is Nothing. Only Afterward Will He Be Something, And He Himself Will Have Made What He Will Be.

Emotion Is First Of All And In Principle An Accident

Men Equally Honest, Equally Devoted To Their Fatherland, Are Momentarily Separated By Different Conceptions Of Their Duty.

Take [stéphane] Mallarme. I Hold Him To Be The Greatest Of French Poets, And I Have Taken Some Time To Understand Him !

Trending Author

Lyndon B. Johnson

Herbert Marcuse

Kevin J. Anderson

Category