Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980)
Normally known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre, was a French existentialist philosopher, dramatist and screenwriter, novelist, and critic.
As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished.
It is disappointing to realize that, hidden beyond these magnificent and promising names, is the same checkerboard city, the same red and green traffic lights and the same provincial look.
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.
man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.
To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.
You are a tiny little girl, Electra. Other little girls dreamed of being the richest or the most beautiful women of all. And you, fascinated by the horrid destiny of your people, you wished to become the most pained and the most criminal ... At your age, children still play with dolls and they play hopscotch. You, poor child, without toys or playmates, you played murder, because it is a game that one can play alone.
With despair, true optimism begins: the optimism of the man who expects nothing, who knows he has no rights and nothing coming to him, who rejoices in counting on himself alone and in acting alone for the good of all.
Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.
Suppose that I wish to deserve the title of “robber of remorse” and that I place in myself all [the townspeople’s] repentence?
I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.
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.
I am a man, Jupiter, and each man must invent his own path.
Life has no meaning a priori … It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.
They made me take cod liver oil: that is the height of luxury: a medicine to make you hungry while the others, in the street, would have sold themselves for a beefsteak. I saw them passing my window with their signs: “Give me bread”.
Quand les riches se font la guerre, ce sont les pauvres qui meurent.
I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good.
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.
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.
A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.
If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light.