Jean Paul Sartre: Other

Jean Paul Sartre was French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. Explore interesting quotes on other.
Jean Paul Sartre: 642 quotes51 likes

“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.”

Jean Paul Sartre The Flies

Jupiter, Act 2
The Flies (1943)

“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 — as not-bound to life.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Being and Nothingness

Source: Being and Nothingness (1943), p. 237, 1998 edition

“Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.”

Jean Paul Sartre Dirty Hands

Act 5, sc. 2
Dirty Hands (1948)

“His obedience is real since he really and truly fulfills his mission, since he runs real risks in order to carry out the beloved’s orders. But, on the other hand, it is imaginary because he submits only to a creature of his mind.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

152
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

“The anti‐Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to him. He has placed himself on other ground from the beginning. If out of courtesy he consents for a moment to defend his point of view, he lends himself but does not give himself. He tries simply to project his intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse. I mentioned awhile back some remarks by anti‐Semites, all of them absurd: "I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc." Never believe that anti‐ Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.”

Jean Paul Sartre

Pages 13-14
(1945)

“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.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Being and Nothingness

Being and Nothingness (1943)

“Catherine: Why commit Evil?
Goetz: Because Good has already been done.
Catherine: Who has done it?
Goetz: God the Father. I, on the other hand, am improvising.”

Jean Paul Sartre book The Devil and the Good Lord

Act 3, sc. 4
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

“The strangest mores of the most of-the-way societies will, in spite of everything, be relatively comprehensible to the person who has a flesh-and-blood knowledge of man’s needs, anxieties, and hopes. If, on the other hand, this experience is lacking, he will not even be able to understand the customs of those about him.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

139
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

“The dreamer must contaminate the others by his dream, he must make them fall into it”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

(399).
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

“All-powerful god, who am I but the fear that I inspire in others?”

Jean Paul Sartre The Flies

King Aegistheus to Jupiter, Act 2
The Flies (1943)

“Genet is a man-failure: he wills the impossible in order to derive from the tragic grandeur of this defeat the assurance that there is something other than the possible.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

(213).
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

“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.”

Jean Paul Sartre

Source: Preface to The Wretched of the Earth (1961), p. xlvi

“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.”

Jean Paul Sartre

Source: Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), pp. 51-52