Background Image

...

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.

-Jean-Paul Sartre

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

It Is Not Right,

Jean-Paul Sartre

...

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.

Views: 6

Topic

More From Jean-Paul Sartre

Understand Me: I Wish To Be A Man From Somewhere, A Man Among Men. You See, A Slave, When He Passes By, Weary And Surly, Carrying A Heavy Load, Limping Along And Looking Down At His Feet, Only At His Feet To Avoid Falling Down; He Is In His Town, Like A Leaf In Greenery, Like A Tree In A Forest, Argos Surrounds Him, Heavy And Warm, Full Of Herself; I Want To Be That Slave, Electra, I Want To Pull The City Around Me And To Roll Myself Up In It Like A Blanket. I Will Not Leave.

If You Are Not Already Dead, Forgive. Rancor Is Heavy, It Is Worldly; Leave It On Earth: Die Light.

I Can Receive Nothing More From These Tragic Solitudes Than A Little Empty Purity.

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

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.

It's Just What People Do When They're Getting Old, When They're Sick Of Themselves And Their Life; They Think Of Money And Take Care Of Themselves.

Photographs Are Not Ideas. They Give Us Ideas.

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

I Do Not Feel That I Am The Product Of Chance, A Speck Of Dust In The Universe, But Someone Who Was Expected, Prepared, Prefigured. In Short, A Being Whom Only A Creator Could Put Here; And This Idea Of A Creating Hand Refers To God.

Objects Should Not Touch Because They Are Not Alive. You Use Them, Put Them Back In Place, You Live Among Them: They Are Useful, Nothing More. But They Touch Me, It Is Unbearable. I Am Afraid Of Being In Contact With Them As Though They Were Living Beasts.

I Am Myself And I Am Here.

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

Total War Is No Longer War Waged By All Members Of One National Community Against All Those Of Another. It Is Total... Because It May Well Involve The Whole World.

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

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

I Hate Victims Who Respect Their Executioners.

Absurd, Irreducible; Nothing--not Even A Profound And Secret Delirium Of Nature--could Explain [a Tree Root].

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

Man Is Nothing Else But What He Makes Of Himself. [it Is A Matter Of Choice, Not Chance.] Such Is The First Principle Of Existentialism.

From The Period When I Wrote La Nausea I Wanted To Create A Morality. My Evolution Consists In My No Longer Dreaming Of Doing So.

We Make Our Own Hell Out Of The People Around Us.

I Consider Les Nourritures Terrestres As A Frightening Book: "look For God In No Other Place Than Everywhere." Go And Tell That To A Workman, An Engineer!

Therefore, In The Nature Of This Will For Freedom, Which Freedom Itself Implies, I May Pass Judgement On Those Who Seek To Hide From Themselves The Complete Arbitrariness And The Complete Freedom Of Their Existence.

All That I Know About My Life, It Seems, I Have Learned In Books.

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.

We Do Not Wish To Say Only That A Man Is Responsible For His Own Individuality, But That He Is Responsible For That Of All Men.

I Construct My Memories With My Present. I Am Lost, Abandoned In The Present. I Try In Vain To Rejoin The Past: I Cannot Escape.

God Is Absence. God Is The Solitude Of Man.

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

All-powerful God, Who Am I But The Fear That I Inspire In Others?

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 The Moments Of My Life To Follow And Order Themselves Like Those Of A Life Remembered. You Might As Well Try And Catch Time By The Tail.

[contemporary Writer] Could Be A Kind Of [samuel] Beckett Who Would Not Be Felt To Be Totally Committed To Despair.

I Must Be Without Remorse Or Regrets As I Am Without Excuse; For From The Instant Of My Upsurge Into Being, I Carry The Weight Of The World By Myself Alone Without Help, Engaged In A World For Which I Bear The Whole Responsibility Without Being Able, Whatever I Do, To Tear Myself Away From This Responsibility For An Instant.

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.

Like All Dreamers, I Mistook Disenchantment For Truth.

If You Die, I Will Lie Down Beside You And I Will Stay There Until The End, Without Eating Or Drinking, You Will Rot In My Arms And I Will Love You As Carcass: For You Love Nothing If You Do Not Love Everything.

Man Is Nothing Else But What He Purposes, He Exists Only In So Far As He Realizes Himself, He Is Therefore Nothing Else But The Sum Of His Actions, Nothing Else But What His Life Is.

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.

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.

I Clung To Nothing, In A Way I Was Calm. But It Was A Horrible Calm—because Of My Body; My Body, I Saw With Its Eyes, I Heard With Its Ears, But It Was No Longer Me; It Sweated And Trembled By Itself And I Didn’t Recognize It Any More.

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

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

Characteristics

In The Nineteenth Century One Had To Give All Sorts Of Guarantees And Lead An Exemplary Life In Order To Cleanse Oneself In The Eyes Of The Bourgeois Of The Sin Of Writing, For Literature Is, In Essence, Heresy. The Situation Has Not Changed Except That It Is Now The Communists, That Is, The Qualified Representatives Of The Proletariat, Who As A Matter Of Principle Regard The Writer As Suspect.

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 Must Be Invented Each Day

Everything Is Gratuitous, This Garden, This City And Myself. When You Suddenly Realize It, It Makes You Feel Sick And Everything Begins To Drift . . . That's Nausea.

Is There Really Nothing, Nothing Left Of Me?

In Life Man Commits Himself And Draws His Own Portrait, Outside Of Which There Is Nothing. No Doubt This Thought May Seem Harsh To Someone Who Has Not Made A Success Of His Life. But On The Other Hand, It Helps People To Understand That Reality Alone Counts, And That Dreams, Expectations And Hopes Only Serve To Define A Man As A Broken Dream, Aborted Hopes, And Futile Expectations.

I Should Wish [alain Robbe-grillet] To Realize That Guinea Exists.

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

The Painful Secret Of Gods And Kings Is That Men Are Free, Aegistheus. You Know It And They Do Not.

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.

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

For The Time Being I Have Seen Enough Of Living Things, Of Dogs, Of Men, Of All Flabby Masses Which Move Spontaneously.

One Should Commit No Stupidity Twice, The Variety Of Choice Is, In The End, Large Enough.

In Love, One And One Are One.

Intellectuals Cannot Be Good Revolutionaries; They Are Just Good Enough To Be Assassins.

A Man Is Involved In Life, Leaves His Impress On It, And Outside Of That There Is Nothing.

For The Artist, The Color, The Bouquet, The Tinkling Of The Spoon On The Saucer, Are Things In The Highest Degree. He Stops At The Quality Of The Sound Or The Form. He Returns To It Constantly And Is Enchanted With It.

Before You Come Alive, Life Is Nothing; It 's Up To You To Give It A Meaning, And Value Is Nothing Else But The Meaning That You Choose.

Life Has No Meaning

Consciousness Is A Being The Nature Of Which Is To Be Conscious Of The Nothingness Of Its Being.

Every Word Has Consequences. Every Silence, Too.

The Poor Don't Know That Their Function In Life Is To Exercise Our Generosity.

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

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.

Un Homme N'est Rien D'autre Qu'une Se Rie D'entreprises. A Man Is No Other Than A Series Of Undertakings.

Everything Has Been Figured Out, Except How To Live.

I Will Not Be Modest. Humble, As Much As You Like, But Not Modest. Modesty Is The Virtue Of The Lukewarm.

Violence Is Good For Those Who Have Nothing To Lose.

Nothing To Lose

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.

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

Words Are Loaded Pistols.

Thought Provoking

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

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

I’ve Dropped Out Of Their Hearts Like A Little Sparrow Fallen From Its Nest. So Gather Me Up, Dear, Fold Me To Your Heart – And You’ll See How Nice I Can Be.

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.

Il N'y A Pas D'autre Univers Qu'un Univers Humain, L'univers De La Subjectivite Humaine. There Is No Other Universe Except The Human Universe, The Universe Of Human Subjectivity.

What I Lacked [in La Nausee] Was A Sense Of Reality. I Have Changed Since. I Have Slowly Learned To Experience Reality.

Let It Crumble! Let The Rocks Revile Me And Flowers Wilt At My Coming. Your Whole Universe Is Not Enough To Prove Me Wrong. You Are The King Of Gods, King Of Stones And Stars, King Of The Waves Of The Sea. But You Are Not The King Of Man.

Death Is A Continuation Of My Life Without Me.

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

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.

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

It Is Not A Matter Of Indifference Whether We Like Oysters Or Clams, Snails Or Shrimp, If Only We Know How To Unravel The Existential Significance Of These Foods.

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

I Am Beginning To Believe That Nothing Can Ever Be Proved. These Are Honest Hypotheses Which Take The Facts Into Account: But I Sense So Definitely That They Come From Me, And That They Are Simply A Way Of Unifying My Own Knowledge. Not A Glimmer Comes From Rollebon's Side. Slow, Lazy, Sulky, The Facts Adapt Themselves To The Rigour Of The Order I Wish To Give Them; But It Remains Outside Of Them. I Have The Feeling Of Doing A Work Of Pure Imagination.

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

I Think There Is An Enormous Diference Between Speaking And Writing. One Rereads What One Writes. But One Might Read It Slowly Or Quickly. In Other Words, You Do Not Know How Long You Will Have To Spend Deliberating Over A Sentence. ... But If I Listen To A Tape Recorder, The Listening Time Is Determined By The Speed At Which The Tape Turns And Not By My Own Needs.

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 Have Seen Children Dying Of Hunger. Over Against A Dying Child La Nausee Cannot Act As A Counterweight.

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

At That Time [1954], As A Result Of Political Events, I Was Deeply Preoccupied By My Relations With The Communist Party.

The Past Is The Luxury Of Proprietors.

To Be Responsible Is To Be The Uncontested Author Of An Event Or Thing.

Being Responsible

Criticism Often Takes From The Tree Caterpillars And Blossoms Together.

On My Way To The Office In The Morning, There Are, In Front Of Me, Behind Me, Other Men Going To Their Jobs. I See Them; If I Dared, I Would Smile At Them. I Think To Myself That I Am A Socialist, That They Are The Purpose Of My Life, Of My Efforts And That They Do Not Know It Yet.

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

It Is Enough That One Man Hate Another For Hate To Gain, Little By Little, All Mankind.

For The Moment, The Jazz Is Playing; There Is No Melody, Just Notes, A Myriad Tiny Tremors. The Notes Know No Rest, An Inflexibleorder Gives Birth To Them Then Destroys Them, Without Ever Leaving Them The Chance To Recuperate And Exist For Themselves.... I Would Like To Hole Them Back, But I Know That, If I Succeeded In Stooping One, There Would Only Remain In May Hand A Corrupt And Languishing Sound. I Must Accept Their Death; I Must Even Want That Death: I Know Of Few More Bitter Or Intense Impressions.

There Is A Universe Behind And Before Him. And The Day Is Approaching When Closing The Last Book On The Last Shelf On The Far Left; He Will Say To Himself, "now What?

I Tell You In Truth: All Men Are Prophets Or Else God Does Not Exist.

There Are Photographers Who Push For War Because They Make Stories. They Search For A Chinese Who Has A More Chinese Are Than The Others And They End Up Finding One. They Have Him Take A Typically Chinese Pose And Surround Him With Chinoiseries. What Have They Captured On Their Film? A Chinese? Definitely Not: The Idea Of The Chinese.

The [communist] Party Has One Objective: The Creation Of A Socialist Economy; And One Means: The Utilization Of The Class Struggle.

One Is Still What One Is Going To Cease To Be And Already What One Is Going To Become. One Lives One's Death, One Dies One's Life.

Existence Of Life

The Best Work Is Not What Is Most Difficult For You; It Is What You Do Best.

We Only Become What We Are By The Radical And Deep-seated Refusal Of That Which Others Have Made Of Us.

Naturally, In The Course Of My Life I Have Made Lots Of Mistakes, Large And Small, For One Reason Or Another, But At The Heart Of It All, Every Time I Made A Mistake It Was Because I Was Not Radical Enough.

There Is No Book Of Mine That I Reject. That Does Not Mean That I Find Them Good.

In A Word, Man Must Create His Own Essence: It Is In Throwing Himself Into The World, Suffering There, Struggling There, That He Gradually Defines Himself.

Because We Can Imagine, We Are Free.

To Love Is Never Just To Love Since It Is Also To Will To Love, And ... To Love In Spite Of Oneself, To Allow Oneself To Be Overcome By One's Love.

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.

Man Is Condemned To Be Free; Because Once Thrown Into The World, He Is Responsible For Everything He Does.

Man Is Nothing Else But What He Makes Of Himself.

Existence Is Prior To Essence.

What Then Did You Expect When You Unbound The Gag That Muted Those Black Mouths? That They Would Chant Your Praises? Did You Think That When Those Heads That Our Fathers Had Forcibly Bowed Down To The Ground Were Raised Again, You Would Find Adoration In Their Eyes?

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

Neither Sex, Without Some Fertilization Of The Complimentary Characters Of The Other, Is Capable Of The Highest Reaches Of Human Endeavor.

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.

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

Acting Is Happy Agony.

Imagination Is Not An Empirical Or Superadded Power Of Consciousness, It Is The Whole Of Consciousness As It Realizes Its Freedom.

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 Certain That We Cannot Escape Anguish, For We Are Anguish.

I Can Always Choose, But I Ought To Know That If I Do Not Choose, I Am Still Choosing.

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.

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.

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

With A Little Luck That Epoch May Arrive. I Am On The Side Of Those Who Think That Things Will Go Better When The World Has Changed.

There Are Two Kinds Of Existentialist; First, Those Who Are Christian...and On The Other Hand The Atheistic Existentialists, Among Whom...i Class Myself. What They Have In Common Is That They Think That Existence Precedes Essence, Or, If You Prefer, That Subjectivity Must Be The Turning Point.

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

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.

My Pessimism Has Never Been Flabby.

The Aim Of Language...is To Communicate...to Impart To Others The Results One Has Obtained...as I Talk, I Reveal The Situation...i Reveal It To Myself And To Others In Order To Change It.

That God Does Not Exist, I Cannot Deny, That My Whole Being Cries Out For God I Cannot Forget.

If I Became A Philosopher, If I Have So Keenly Sought This Fame For Which I'm Still Waiting, It's All Been To Seduce Women Basically.

That’s What Existence Means: Draining One’s Own Self Dry Without The Sense Of Thirst.

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

Yes, I Am So Free. And What A Superb Absence Is My Soul.

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

The More One Is Absorbed In Fighting Evil, The Less One Is Tempted To Place The Good In Question.

Every Existing Thing Is Born Without Reason, Prolongs Itself Out Of Weakness, And Dies By Chance.

I Had Been Playing With Matches And Burned A Small Rug. I Was In The Process Of Covering Up My Crime When Suddenly God Saw Me. I Felt His Gaze Inside My Head And On My Hands....i Flew Into A Rage Against So Crude An Indiscretion, I Blasphemed....he Never Looked At Me Again....i Had The More Difficulty Getting Rid Of Him The Holy Ghost In That He Had Installed Himself At The Back Of My Head....i Collared The Holy Ghost In The Cellar And Threw Him Out.

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

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.

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

She Smiled And Said With An Ecstatic Air: "it Shines Like A Little Diamond", "what Does?" "this Moment. It Is Round, It Hangs In Empty Space Like A Little Diamond; I Am Eternal.

I Am Finishing A Biography Of [gustave] Flaubert. Because He Is The Opposite Of What I Am. One Needs To Rub Up Against Argument.

One Of The Chief Motives Of Artistic Creation Is Certainly The Need Of Feeling That We Are Essential In Relationship To The World.

When The Rich Wage War, It's The Poor Who Die.

For Forty Years I Was Conscripted By The Absolute, The Neurosis. The Absolute Is Gone. There Remain Countless Tasks Among Which Literature Is In No Way Privileged.

Better A Good Journalist Than A Poor Assassin.

Good Journalism

But I Must Finally Realize That I Am Subject To These Sudden Transformations. The Thing Is That I Rarely Think; A Crowd Of Small Metamorphoses Accumulate In Me Without My Noticing It, And Then, One Fine Day, A Veritable Revolution Takes Place.

[m]an Is Condemned To Be Free. Condemned, Because He Did Not Create Himself, In Other Respect Is Free; Because, Once Thrown Into The World, He Is Responsible For Everything He Does. The Existentialist Does Not Believe In The Power Of Passion. He Will Never Agree That A Sweeping Passion Is A Ravaging Torrent Which Fatally Leads A Man To Certain Acts And Is Therefore An Excuse. He Thinks That Man Is Responsible For His Passion.

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.

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.

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.

It's Quite An Undertaking To Start Loving Somebody. You Have To Have Energy, Generosity, Blindness. There Is Even A Moment Right At The Start Where You Have To Jump Across An Abyss: If You Think About It You Don't Do It.

I Had Realized In The Meantime That Action Too Has Its Difficulties, And That One Can Also Be Led To It By Neurosis. We Are Not Saved By Politics Any More Than By Literature.

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

I Exist. It's Sweet, So Sweet, So Slow. And Light: You'd Think It Floated All By Itself. It Stirs. It Brushes By Me, Melts And Vanishes. Gently, Gently. There Is Bubbling Water In My Mouth. I Swallow. It Slides Down My Throat, It Caresses Me — And Now It Comes Up Again Into My Mouth. For Ever I Shall Have A Little Pool Of Whitish Water In My Mouth - Lying Low - Grazing My Tongue. And This Pool Is Still Me. And The Tongue. And The Throat Is Me.

Ah! Yes, I Know: Those Who See Me Rarely Trust My Word: I Must Look Too Intelligent To Keep It.

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

Man Is Abandoned On Earth In The Midst Of His Infinite Responsibilities, Without Help, With No Aim But What He Sets Himself.

Happiness Has To Be Installed In Each Person As A State Of Affairs Completely Cut Off From The Process That Brought It About And, In Particular, From The Real Situation. Man Has To Be Affected With Happiness. It Is A Tonality Given To Him. Contradiction: If One Does Take Care To Give Him Happiness, It Is Because He Is A Free Creature--but In Order To Give It To Him, One Turns Him Into An Object.

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 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.

Good Digestions, The Gray Monotony Of Provincial Life, And The Boredom-ah The Soul-destroying Boredom-of Long Days Of Mild Content.

God Is The Solitude Of Men. There Was Only Me: I Alone Decided To Commit Evil; Alone, I Invented Good. I Am The One Who Cheated, I Am The One Who Performed Miracles, I Am The One Accusing Myself Today, I Alone Can Absolve Myself; Me, The Man.

I Have Changed As Everyone Changes: Within A Permanency.

To Eat Is To Appropriate By Destruction.

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

There Is No God

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

A Human Being Who Wakened In The Morning With A Queesy Stomach, With Fifteen Hours To Kill Before Next Bedtime, Had Not Much Use For Freedom.

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.

An Individual Chooses And Makes Himself.

I Have Nothing But Contempt For You Idiotic Chosen Ones Who Have The Heart To Rejoice When There Are The Damned In Hell And The Poor On Earth; As For Me, I Am On The Side Of Men And I Will Not Leave It.

I Exist. It Is Soft, So Soft, So Slow. And Light: It Seems As Though It Suspends In The Air. It Moves.

Life Gave Me Everything I Asked If All I Asked Was Not A Great Deal, That's My Problem!

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.

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.

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

I Considered Calmly That I Was Born To Write.

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.

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

There Is No Salvation Anywhere. The Idea Of Salvation Implies The Idea Of An Absolute.

Ah! Do Not Judge The Gods, Young Man, They Have Painful Secrets.

To Whomever Gives A Kiss Or A Blow Render A Kiss Or Blow But To Whomever Gives When You Are Unable To Return Offer All The Hatred In Your Heart For You Were Slaves And He Enslaves You

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.

We Are Now In A Position To Understand The Anti-semite. He Is A Man Who Is Afraid. Not Of The Jews, To Be Sure, But Of Himself, Of His Own Consciousness, Of His Liberty, Of His Instincts, Of His Responsibilities, Of Solitariness, Of Change, Of Society, And Of The World Of Everything Except The Jews.

In Guinea I Could Read [franz] Kafka. I Re-discover In Him My Own Discomfort.

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

It Is Always More Valuable To Report The Truth.

In Football Everything Is Complicated By The Presence Of The Opposite Team.

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.

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.

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.

What Do I Care About Jupiter? Justice Is A Human Issue, And I Do Not Need A God To Teach It To Me.

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

Trending Author

Sherwood Anderson

M. Russell Ballard

Category