Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980)
Normally known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre, was a French existentialist philosopher, dramatist and screenwriter, novelist, and critic.
Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.
Her face seems ravaged by both lightning and hail. But on yours there is something like the promise of a storm: one day passion will burn it to the bone.
Like all dreamers, I confuse disenchantment with truth.
Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
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 say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.
It is not the same thing. You are perhaps not lying, but you are not telling the truth.
L'homme est une passion inutile.
It is too early to love. We will buy the right to do so by shedding blood.
Karsky: I met your father last week. Are you still interested in hearing how he is doing?
Hugo: No.
Karsky: It is very probable that you will be responsible for his death.
Hugo: It is virtually certain that he is responsible for my life. We are even.
But, if it will help ease your irritated souls, please know, dearly departed, that you have ruined our lives.
During the last months of the German Occupation in 1944, the young man who was to become France’s most controversial contemporary philosopher and the woman who was to become its most controversial feminist met the professional criminal who was to become its most controversial playwright.
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.
We will not go to Heaven,Goetz, and even if we both entered it, we would not have eyes to see each other, nor hands to touch each other. Up there, God gets all the attention.... We can only love on this earth and against God.
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 know only one Church: it is the society of men.
If you seek authenticity for authenticity's sake, you are no longer authentic.
She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.
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.
To eat is to appropriate by destruction.