Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980)
Normally known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre, was a French existentialist philosopher, dramatist and screenwriter, novelist, and critic.
It is the same thing: killing, dying, it is the same thing: one is just as alone in each. He is lucky, he will only die once. As for me, for ten days I have been killing him at every minute.
Now I am weary and I can no longer tell good from Evil, and I need someone to show me the way.
If we must absolutely mention this state of affairs, I suggest that we call ourselves “absent”, that is more proper.
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.
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.
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.
It is no longer possible to escape men. Farewell to the monsters, farewell to the saints. Farewell to pride. All that is left is men.
I grasp at each second, trying to suck it dry: nothing happens which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever in myself, nothing, neither the fugitive tenderness of those lovely eyes, nor the noises of the street, nor the false dawn of early morning: and even so the minute passes and I do not hold it back, I like to see it pass.
Each human reality is at the same time a direct project to metamorphose its own For-itself into an In-itself-For-itself, a project of the appropriation of the world as a totality of being-in-itself, in the form of a fundamental quality. Every human reality is a passion in that it projects losing itself so as to found being and by the same stroke to constitute the In-itself which escapes contingency by being its own foundation, the Ens causa sui, which religions call God. Thus the passion of man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man loses himself as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion.
As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
I entered the [Communist] Party because its cause was just and I will leave it when it ceases to be just.
Don’t you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.
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.
Your crystal? That’s silly. Whom do you think you are fooling? Come on, everyone knows that I threw the baby out of the window. The crystal is shattered on earth, and I do not care. I am no longer anything but a skin, and my skin does not belong to you.
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.
I do not understand! I understand nothing! I cannot understand nor do I want to understand! I want to believe! To Believe!
The past is the luxury of proprietors.
Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.
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.