Jean-Paul Sartre
The [Communist] Party has one objective: the creation of a socialist economy; and one means: the utilization of the class struggle.Collection: Party
What do you want to do with the [Communist] Party? A racing stable? What good is it to sharpen a knife every day if you never useit for slicing? A party is never more than a means. There is only one objective: power.Collection: Party
L'homme est une passion inutile. Man is a useless passion.Collection: Passion
Perception is naturally surpassed toward action; better yet, it can be revealed only in and through projects of action. The world is revealed as an "always future hollow", for we are always future to ourselves.Collection: Perception
I had been playing with matches and burned a small rug. I was in the process of covering up my crime when suddenly God saw me. I felt His gaze inside my head and on my hands....I flew into a rage against so crude an indiscretion, I blasphemed....He never looked at me again....I had the more difficulty getting rid of Him the Holy Ghost in that He had installed Himself at the back of my head....I collared the Holy Ghost in the cellar and threw Him out.Collection: God
Man exists, turns up, appears on the scene and only afterwards, defines himselfCollection: Men
All the same, they [books] do serve some purpose. Culture doesn't save anything or anyone, it doesn't justify. But it's a product of man: he projects himself into it, he recognizes himself in it; that critical mirror alone offers him his image.Collection: Book
I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it. I know I'll never jump again.Collection: Jobs
Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom-ah the soul-destroying boredom-of long days of mild content.Collection: Bored
The status of 'native' is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent.Collection: People
Understand me: I wish to be a man from somewhere, a man among men. You see, a slave, when he passes by, weary and surly, carrying a heavy load, limping along and looking down at his feet, only at his feet to avoid falling down; he is in his town, like a leaf in greenery, like a tree in a forest, argos surrounds him, heavy and warm, full of herself; I want to be that slave, Electra, I want to pull the city around me and to roll myself up in it like a blanket. I will not leave.Collection: Fall
The appearance of the other in the world corresponds therefore to a congealed sliding of the whole universe.Collection: World
The past is the luxury of proprietors.Collection: Past
Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the gods can do nothing against that man.Collection: Men
I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violenceCollection: Justice
I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.Collection: Dust
If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light.Collection: Light
Aegistheus, the kings have another secret.... Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the Gods can do nothing against that man. It is a matter for men to handle amongst themselves, and it is up to other men and to them alone to let him flee or to destroy him.Collection: Kings
Everything in my past, in my training, everything that has been most essential in my activity up to now has made me above all a man who writes, and it is too late for that to change.Collection: Writing
Some men are born committed to action: they do not have a choice, they have been thrown on a path, at the end of that path, an act awaits them, their act.Collection: Men
Either the USSR was not the country of socialism, in which case socialism didn't exist anywhere and doubtless, wasn't possible: or else, socialism was that, this abominable monster, this police state, the power of beasts of prey.Collection: Country
What I lacked [in La Nausee] was a sense of reality. I have changed since. I have slowly learned to experience reality.Collection: Reality
I receive letters from workers, from secretaries. . . . They are the most interesting ones.Collection: Interesting
Besides one should not believe that the people only want reading that is easy to absorb.Collection: Reading
I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.Collection: Order
There is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving.Collection: Deeds
He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.Collection: Becoming
It is the same: a chosen one is a man whom God's finger crushes against the wall.Collection: Crush
It is better; heavier, crueler. The mouth you wear for hell.Collection: Mouths
Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.Collection: Hurt
So long as one believes in God, one has the right to do the Good in order to be moral.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Children
It is enough that one man hate another for hate to gain, little by little, all mankind.Collection: Hate
A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.Collection: Men
Some of these days, Oh, you'll miss me honeyCollection: Missing
Ah! How I hate the crimes of the new generation: they are dry and sterile as darnel.Collection: Hate
A good hanging now and then -- that entertains folk in the provinces and robs death of its glamour.Collection: Now And Then
Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.Collection: Men
[Contemporary writer] could be a kind of [Samuel] Beckett who would not be felt to be totally committed to despair.Collection: Despair
I know only one Church: it is the society of men.Collection: Men
Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up; I forget them almost immediately.Collection: Shapes
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.Collection: People
In the state I was in, if someone had come and told me I could go home quietly, that they would leave me my life whole, it would have left me cold: several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.Collection: Home
Absurd, irreducible; nothing--not even a profound and secret delirium of nature--could explain [a tree root].Collection: Nature
Then I realized what separated us: what I thought about him could not reach him; it was psychology, the kind they write about in books. But his judgment went through me like a sword and questioned my very right to exist. And it was true, I had always realized it; I hadn't the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe. My life put out feelers towards small pleasures in every direction. Sometimes it sent out vague signals; at other times I felt nothing more than a harmless buzzing.Collection: Book