Jean-Paul Sartre
playwright, epistemologist, novelist, screenwriter, biographer, literary critic, essayist, resistance fighter, political writer, writer, philosopher, peace activist, opinion journalist, intellectual, lyricist
Read on Wikipedia1905 – 1980
All Quotes by Jean-Paul Sartre
“One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.”
“Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.”
“Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.”
“I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.”
“The French bourgeois doesn’t dislike shit, provided it is served up to him at the right time.”
“The homosexual never thinks of himself when someone is branded in his presence with the name homosexual. ...His sexual tastes will doubtless lead him to enter into relationships with this suspect category, but he would like to make use of them without being likened to them. Here, too, the ban that is cast on certain men by society has destroyed all possibility of reciprocity among them. Shame isolates.”
“Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.”
“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.”
“This is the contradiction of racism, colonialism, and all forms of tyranny: in order to treat a man like a dog, one must first recognize him as a man.”
“Everything is both a trap and a display; the secret reality of the object is what the Other makes of it.”
“In some places the metropolis makes do with paying a clique of feudal overlords; in others, it has fabricated a fake bourgeoisie of colonized subjects in a system of divide and rule; elsewhere, it has killed two birds with one stone: the colony is both settlement and exploitation.”
“To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.”
“[W]e only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.”
“The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.”
“If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.”
“When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.”
“Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.”
“Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.”
“As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.”
“Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.”
“Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.”
“Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.”
“If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.”
“Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.”
“Life begins on the other side of despair.”
“Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.”
“Hell is other people.”
“The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.”
“Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.”
“We do not judge the people we love.”
“Words are loaded pistols.”
“Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.”
“Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.”
“Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”
“I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.”
“Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.”
“We must act out passion before we can feel it.”
“As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.”
“Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total... because it may well involve the whole world.”
“One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.”
“Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.”
“For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.”
“I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.”
“To eat is to appropriate by destruction.”
“Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.”
“Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.”
“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”
“There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”
“Commitment is an act, not a word.”
“When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.”
“What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.”
“It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.”
“Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.”
“We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.”
“It is only in our decisions that we are important.”
“No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.”
“She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.”
“That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.”
“I hate victims who respect their executioners.”
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
“If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically.”
“All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.”
“There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.”
“I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.”
“I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.”
“What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.”
“Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.”
“All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.”
“You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.”
“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.”
“I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.”
“One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.”
“A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.”
“God is absence. God is the solitude of man.”
“My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.”
“Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.”
“Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.”
“I confused things with their names: that is belief.”
“The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.”
“One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.”
“Dostoevsky once wrote: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse.”
“It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.”
“Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.”
“He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.”
“He yawned. He had finished the day and he had also finished with his youth. Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism, smiling tolerance, resignation, common sense stoicism - all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life.”
“What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?”
“the worst part about being lied to is knowing you werent worth the truth”
“Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.”
“Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.”
“Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.”
“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.”
“If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.”
“A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.”
“What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal…. For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space.”
“Il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action.”
“She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.”
“Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.”
“I hate victims who respect their executioners.”
“You know how much I admire Che Guevara. In fact, I believe that the man was not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age: as a fighter and as a man, as a theoretician who was able to further the cause of revolution by drawing his theories from his personal experience in battle.”
“When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell a story: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow by too: you suddenly see people appear who speak and then go away; you plunge into stories of which you can't make head or tail: you'd make a terrible witness.”
“Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.”
“People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?”
“I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.”
“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.”
“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.”
“If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.”
“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.”
“Existence precedes and rules essence.”
“I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.”
“Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.”
“Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”
“Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.”
“Monsieur … I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.”
“All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.”
“I wanted for the moments in my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. It would be just as well to try to catch time by the tail.”
“Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.”
“As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.”
“I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.”
“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.”
“Acting is happy agony.”
“The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.”
“Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?”
“The past is the luxury of proprietors.”
“The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.”
“Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?”
“For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.”
“All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.”
“How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?”
“I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.”
“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.”
“I grasp at each second, trying to suck it dry: nothing happens which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever in myself, nothing, neither the fugitive tenderness of those lovely eyes, nor the noises of the street, nor the false dawn of early morning: and even so the minute passes and I do not hold it back, I like to see it pass.”
“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 responsible for everything … except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being. Therefore everything takes place as if I were compelled to be responsible. I am abandoned in the world … in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and 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.”
“Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.”
“To eat is to appropriate by destruction.”
“The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.”
“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 —\xa0as not-bound to life.”
“All human activities are equivalent … and … all are on principle doomed to failure.”
“Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
“It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.”
“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.”
“Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not. He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to recover his inner being.”
“Generally speaking there is no irreducible taste or inclination. They all represent a certain appropriative choice of being. It is up to existential psychoanalysis to compare and classify them. Ontology abandons us here; it has merely enabled us to determine the ultimate ends of human reality, its fundamental possibilities, and the value which haunts it.”
“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.”
“If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.”
“Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse.”
“Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.”
“Admit it, it is your youth that you regret, more even than your crime; it is my youth you hate, even more than my innocence.”
“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.”
“They are in bad faith — they are afraid — and fear, bad faith have an aroma that the gods find delicious. Yes, the gods like that, the pitiful souls.”
“Life begins on the other side of despair.”
“Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.”
“Yes, I am so free. And what a superb absence is my soul.”
“You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.”
“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.”
“I felt less alone when I didn’t know you yet: I was waiting for the other. I thought only of his strength and never of my weakness. And now here you are, Orestes, it was you. I look at you and I see that we are two orphans.”
“A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.”
“Nicias, do you think you can erase with good deeds the wrongs you committed against your mother? What good deed will ever reach her? Her soul is a scorching noon time, without a single breath of a breeze, nothing moves, nothing changes, nothing lives there; a great emaciated sun, an immobile sun eternally consumes her.”
“What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.”
“Commoners are weightless. But he was a royal bon vivant who, no matter what, always weighed 125 kilos. I would be very surprised if he didn’t have a few pounds left.”
“All-powerful god, who am I but the fear that I inspire in others?”
“Blood doubly unites us, for we share the same blood and we have spilled blood.”
“Suppose that I wish to deserve the title of “robber of remorse” and that I place in myself all [the townspeople’s] repentence?”
“But, if it will help ease your irritated souls, please know, dearly departed, that you have ruined our lives.”
“It is for the sake of order that I seduced Clytemnestra, for the sake of order that I killed my king. I wanted for order to rule and that it rule through me. I have lived without desire, without love, without hope: I made order. Oh! terrible and divine passion!”
“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.”
“There is only one day left, always starting over: It is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”
“I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.”
“He is dead, and my hatred has died with him.”
“Jupiter: I committed the first crime by creating men as mortals. After that, what more could you do, you the murderers?Aegisteus: Come on; they already had death in them: at most you simply hastened things a little.”
“Ah! How I hate the crimes of the new generation: they are dry and sterile as darnel.”
“The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free, Aegistheus. You know it and they do not.”
“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.”
“Now I am weary and I can no longer tell good from Evil, and I need someone to show me the way.”
“Jupiter: I gave you the liberty to serve me.Orestes: That is possible, but it has turned against you and there is nothing either one of us can do about it.”
“I came to claim my kingdom and you refused me because I was not one of you. Now I am one of you, my subjects, we are bound by blood, and I deserve to be your king. Your sins and your remorse, your mighty anguish, I take all upon myself. Fear your dead no more, they are my dead.”
“Remember, Orestes: you were part of my herd, you grazed in the fields along with my sheep. Your liberty is nothing but a mange eating away at you, it is nothing but an exile.”
“We were too light, Electra. Now our feet press down in the earth like the wheels of a cart in its groove. Come with me, and we will walk heavily, bending under the weight of our heavy load.”
“Your entire universe will not be enough to make me guilty. You are the king of the Gods, Jupiter, the king of the stones and of the stars, the king of the waves of the sea. But you are not the king of men.”
“Jupiter: I am not your king, impudent larva? Who then has created you?Orestes: You. But you should not have created me free.”
“I am a man, Jupiter, and each man must invent his own path.”
“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.”
“In a world, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.”
“Man cannot will unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.”
“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.”
“...man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.”
“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.”
“Criminals together. We're in hell, my little friend, and there's never any mistake there. People are not damned for nothing.”
“If we must absolutely mention this state of affairs, I suggest that we call ourselves “absent”, that is more proper.”
“Your crystal? That’s silly. Whom do you think you are fooling? Come on, everyone knows that I threw the baby out of the window. The crystal is shattered on earth, and I do not care. I am no longer anything but a skin, and my skin does not belong to you.”
“It is better; heavier, crueler. The mouth you wear for hell.”
“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.”
“You have stolen my face from me: you know it and I no longer do.”
“Don’t you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.”
“Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.”
“We are in hell and I will have my turn!”
“If only you knew how little I care. Cowardly or not, as long as he is a good kisser.”
“I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.”
“What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist see him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of himself. Man simply is.”
“First, what do we mean by anguish? The existentialist frankly states that man is in anguish. His meaning is as follows-When a man commits himself to anything, fully realizing that he is not only choosing what he will be, but is thereby at the same time a legislator deciding for the whole of mankind-in such a moment a man cannot escape from the sense of complete and profound responsibility.”
“That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.”
“And when we speak of "abandonment" - a favorite word of Heidegger - we only mean to say that God does not exist and that it is necessary to draw the consequences of his absence to the end.”
“It is only in our decisions that we are important.”
“When Descartes said, "Conquer yourself rather than the world," what he meant was, at bottom, - the same - that we should act without hope. Marxists, to whom I have said thus have answered: "Your action is limited, obviously, by your death: but you can rely upon the help of others.”
“A man who belongs to some communist or revolutionary society wills certain concrete ends, which imply the will to freedom, and that freedom is willed in community. We will freedom for freedom’s sake, and in and through the particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own.”
“Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.”
“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.”
“Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.”
“It is the good children, Madame, who make the most terrible revolutionaries. They say nothing, they do not hide under the table, they eat only one sweet at a time, but later on, they make Society pay dearly for it!”
“As for us, my little friend, we entered [the Communist Party] because we were tired of dying of hunger.”
“I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.”
“There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.”
“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”.”
“In any case, if you ever leave me with a handsome man, do not tell me that you trust me because, let me warn you: that is not what will prevent me from deceiving you, if I want to. On the contrary.”
“Karsky: I met your father last week. Are you still interested in hearing how he is doing?Hugo: It is virtually certain that he is responsible for my life. We are even.”
“Listen to me: a family man is never a real family man. An assassin is never entirely assassin. They play a role, you understand. While a dead man, he is really dead. To be or not to be, right?”
“God is absence. God is the solitude of man.”
“It is the same thing: killing, dying, it is the same thing: one is just as alone in each. He is lucky, he will only die once. As for me, for ten days I have been killing him at every minute.”
“I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.”
“I was your luxury. For nineteen years I have been put in your man’s world and was forbidden to touch anything and you made me think that all was going very well and that I did not have to worry about anything but putting flowers in vases. Why did you lie to me? Why did you keep me ignorant, if it was to admit to me one day that this world is cracking and that you are all powerless and to make me choose between a suicide and a murder?”
“I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.”
“Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.”
“I do not give a damn about the dead. They died for the [Communist] Party and the Party can decide what it wants. I practice a live man’s politics, for the living.”
“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 use it for slicing? A party is never more than a means. There is only one objective: power.”
“Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins.”
“I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.”
“The [Communist] Party has one objective: the creation of a socialist economy; and one means: the utilization of the class struggle.”
“As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.”
“You take souls for vegetables.... The gardener can decide what will become of his carrots but no one can choose the good of others for them.”
“I entered the [Communist] Party because its cause was just and I will leave it when it ceases to be just.”
“I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'.”
“The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.”
“I know nothing, I am neither woman nor girl; I have been living in a dream and when someone kissed me, it made me want to laugh. Now I am here before you, it seems as though I have just awakened and it is morning.”
“I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.”
“If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light.”
“I know only one Church: it is the society of men.”
“If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.”
“Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.”
“It is too early to love. We will buy the right to do so by shedding blood.”
“Your church is a whore: she sells her favors to the rich.”
“It is not the same thing. You are perhaps not lying, but you are not telling the truth.”
“I do not understand! I understand nothing! I cannot understand nor do I want to understand! I want to believe! To Believe!”
“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”
“Lord, you have cursed Cain and Cain’s children: thy will be done. You have allowed men’s hearts to be corrupted, that their intentions be rotten, that their actions putrefy and stink: thy will be done.”
“Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.”
“It is the same: a chosen one is a man whom God’s finger crushes against the wall.”
“I can be twenty women, one hundred, if that’s what you want, all women. Ride with me behind you, I weigh nothing, your horse will not feel me. I want to be your whorehouse!”
“Catherine: Why commit Evil?Goetz: God the Father. I, on the other hand, am improvising.”
“I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.”
“Yes, Lord, you are innocence itself: how could you conceive of Nothingness, you who are plenitude? Your gaze is light and transforms all into light: how could you know the half-light in my heart?”
“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.”
“There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.”
“I will not be modest. Humble, as much as you like, but not modest. Modesty is the virtue of the lukewarm.”
“One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.”
“I have nothing but contempt for you idiotic chosen ones who have the heart to rejoice when there are the damned in Hell and the poor on earth; as for me, I am on the side of men and I will not leave it.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”
“Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.”
“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.”
“Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.”
“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.”