Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes
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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?
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The individual's duty is to do what he wants to do, to think whatever he likes, to be accountable to no one but himself, to challenge every idea and every person.
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When she is alone in the rooms I hear her humming to keep herself from thinking.
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I have such a desire to sleep and am so much behind my sleep. A good night, one good night and all this nonsense will be swept away.
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To choose not to choose is still to act.
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I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.
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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.
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I enjoy feeling fastidious and aloof. I enjoy saying no, always no, and I should be afraid of any attempt to construct a finally habitable world, because I should merely have to say - Yes; and act like other people.
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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.
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Time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.
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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.
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The plight of modern man is that he is condemmed to be free.
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If you seek authenticity for authenticity's sake you are no longer authentic.
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As long as the writer cannot write for the two billion men who are hungry, he will be oppressed by a feeling of malaise.
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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.
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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.
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In Guinea I could read [Franz] Kafka. I re-discover in him my own discomfort.
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I had spent my time counterfeiting eternity.
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And I too wanted to be. That is all I wanted; and this is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts which seemed without bounds, I find the same desire again: to drive existence out of me, to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note. That could even make an apologue: there was a poor man who got in the wrong world.
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A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.
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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.
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I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.
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It is too early to love. We will buy the right to do so by shedding blood.
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I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'.
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Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
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Hell is for other people.
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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.
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Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.
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Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself.
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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.
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