Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980)
Normally known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre, was a French existentialist philosopher, dramatist and screenwriter, novelist, and critic.
They are in bad faith — they are afraid — and fear, bad faith have an aroma that the gods find delicious. Yes, the gods like that, the pitiful souls.
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?
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.
If only you knew how little I care. Cowardly or not, as long as he is a good kisser.
As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.
Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.
Jupiter: I am not your king, impudent larva? Who then has created you?
Orestes: You. But you should not have created me free.
It is the same: a chosen one is a man whom God’s finger crushes against the wall.
Admit it, it is your youth that you regret, more even than your crime; it is my youth you hate, even more than my innocence.
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.
I will not be modest. Humble, as much as you like, but not modest. Modesty is the virtue of the lukewarm.
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.
I felt less alone when I didn’t know you yet: I was waiting for the other. I thought only of his strength and never of my weakness. And now here you are, Orestes, it was you. I look at you and I see that we are two orphans.
Jean Paul Sartre has said that all of French Existentialism is to be found in Ivan Karamazov's contention that if there is no God, everything is permitted.
Blood doubly unites us, for we share the same blood and we have spilled blood.
Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.
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.
If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.
The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free, Aegistheus. You know it and they do not.
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.