Jean-Paul Sartre
What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal... For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space.Collection: Space
She smiled and said with an ecstatic air: "It shines like a little diamond", "What does?" "This moment. It is round, it hangs in empty space like a little diamond; I am eternal.Collection: Air
I have always been happy. Even if I had been more honest with regard to myself at that moment I should still have written La Nausee.Collection: Honest
In Les Mots I explain the origin of my madness, of my neurosis. This analysis may help the young who dream of writing.Collection: Dream
In a country lacking leaders, in Africa, for instance, how could a native educated in Europe refuse to become a professor, even at the price of his literary vocation?Collection: Country
Thrown into the atmosphere of action [in 1954], I suddenly understood the kind of neurosis that dominated all my previous work. I had not been able to recognize it before: I was inside. Simone de Beauvoir had guessed these reasons before I did.Collection: Atmosphere
Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them... there is nothing.Collection: Spiritual
The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure nihilation of the In-itself; it is like a hole of being at the heart of Being.Collection: Heart
You see, the contemporary writer must write through his intimations of unease, while trying to elucidate them.Collection: Writing
Abjection is a methodological conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian epoche: it establishes the world as a closed system which consciousness regards from without, in the manner of divine understanding.Collection: Understanding
All-powerful god, who am I but the fear that I inspire in others?Collection: Powerful
Do you think I can read [Alain] Robbe-Grillet in an underdeveloped country? He does not feel himself maimed.Collection: Country
Love or hatred calls for self-surrender. He cuts a fine figure, the warm-blooded, prosperous man, solidly entrenched in his well-being, who one fine day surrenders all to love—or to hatred; himself, his house, his land, his memories.Collection: Memories
Happiness has to be installed in each person as a state of affairs completely cut off from the process that brought it about and, in particular, from the real situation. Man has to be affected with happiness. It is a tonality given to him. Contradiction: if one does take care to give him happiness, it is because he is a free creature--but in order to give it to him, one turns him into an object.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Writing
My eyes feel all soft, all soft as flesh. I'm going to sleep.Collection: Sleep
I think there is an enormous diference between speaking and writing. One rereads what one writes. But one might read it slowly or quickly. In other words, you do not know how long you will have to spend deliberating over a sentence. ... But if I listen to a tape recorder, the listening time is determined by the speed at which the tape turns and not by my own needs.Collection: Writing
As for the square at Meknes, where I used to go every day, it's even simpler: I do not see it at all anymore. All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words that are indivisibly bound together: a charming square at Meknes. ... I don't see anything any more: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.Collection: Memories
Man is the being whose project it is to be God.Collection: Men
A Soviet citizen, an official writer, once said to me: "The day when Communism (that is, well-being for everyone) reigns, man's tragedy will begin: his finitude."Collection: Men
To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in JuneCollection: Summer
Handing over a bank note is enough to make a bicycle belong to me, but my entire life is needed to realize this possession.Collection: Cycling
Take [Stéphane] Mallarme. I hold him to be the greatest of French poets, and I have taken some time to understand him !Collection: Taken
Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.Collection: Lying
Atheism is a cruel long term business, and I have gone through it to the end.Collection: Long
I will take it all: tongs, molten lead, prongs, garrotes, all that burns, all that tears, I want to truly suffer. Better one hundred bites, better the whip, vitriol, than this suffering in the head, this ghost of suffering which grazes and caresses and never hurts enough.Collection: Hurt
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.Collection: Men
I had realized in the meantime that action too has its difficulties, and that one can also be led to it by neurosis. We are not saved by politics any more than by literature.Collection: Literature
To keep hope alive one must, in spite of all mistakes, horrors, and crimes, recognize the obvious superiority of the socialist camp.Collection: Mistake
Something begins in order to end: an adventure doesn't let itself be extended it achieves significance only through its death.Collection: Adventure
Let it crumble! Let the rocks revile me and flowers wilt at my coming. Your whole universe is not enough to prove me wrong. You are the king of gods, king of stones and stars, king of the waves of the sea. But you are not the king of man.Collection: Kings
I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.Collection: Solitude
Man is abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no aim but what he sets himself.Collection: Art
It answers the question that was tormenting you: my love, you are not 'one thing in my life' - not even the most important - because my life no longer belongs to me because...you are always me.Collection: Love You
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.Collection: Pride
This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell.Collection: Adventure
There is no salvation anywhere. The idea of salvation implies the idea of an absolute.Collection: Ideas
For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, just notes, a myriad tiny tremors. The notes know no rest, an inflexibleorder gives birth to them then destroys them, without ever leaving them the chance to recuperate and exist for themselves.... I would like to hole them back, but I know that, if I succeeded in stooping one, there would only remain in may hand a corrupt and languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even want that death: I know of few more bitter or intense impressions.Collection: Music
A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.Collection: Art
Photographs are not ideas. They give us ideas.Collection: Ideas
[Lost of the absolute] is in this sense that ''I no longer know what to do with my life" must be understood. Critics have been mistaken about the meaning of this phrase, seeing in it a cry of despair as in Simone de Beauvoir's "I have been cheated." When she uses this word it is to indicate that she claims from life an absolute which she cannot find there.Collection: Despair
I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything.Collection: Thinking
It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.Collection: Philosophy
Man must be invented each dayCollection: Inspiration
You must be like me; you must suffer in rhythm.Collection: Suffering
When one does nothing, one believes oneself responsible for everything.Collection: Believe
One does not adopt a new idea, one slips into it.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Good Night