Jean-Paul Sartre: Citations en anglais

Jean-Paul Sartre était philosophe, dramaturge, romancier, nouvelliste et essayiste français. Citations en anglais.
Jean-Paul Sartre: 441 citations59 J'aime

“The anti‐Semite understands nothing about modern society. He would be incapable of conceiving of a constructive plan; his action cannot reach the level of the methodical; it remains on the ground of passion. To a long‐term enterprise he prefers an explosion of rage analogous to the running amuck of the Malays. His intellectual activity is confined to interpretation; he seeks in historical events the signs of the presence of an evil power. Out of this spring those childish and elaborate fabrications which give him his resemblance to the extreme paranoiacs. In addition, anti‐Semitism channels evolutionary drives toward the destruction of certain men, not of institutions. An anti‐Semitic mob will consider it has done enough when it has massacred some Jews and burned a few synagogues. It represents, therefore, a safety valve for the owning classes, who encourage it and thus substitute for a dangerous hate against their regime a beneficent hate against particular people. Above all this naive dualism is eminently reassuring to he anti‐Semite himself. If all he has to do is to remove Evil, that means that the Good is already given. He has no need to seek it in anguish, to invent it, to scrutinize it patiently when he has found it, to prove it in action, to verify it by its consequences, or, finally, to shoulder he responsibilities of the moral choice be has made. It is not by chance that the great outbursts of anti‐Semitic rage conceal a basic optimism. The anti‐Semite as cast his lot for Evil so as not to have to cast his lot for Good. The more one is absorbed in fighting Evil, he less one is tempted to place the Good in question. One does not need to talk about it, yet it is always understood in the discourse of the anti‐Semite and it remains understood in his thought. When he has fulfilled his mission as holy destroyer, the Lost Paradise will reconstitute itself. For the moment so many tasks confront the anti‐Semite that he does not have time to think about it. He is in the breach, fighting, and each of his outbursts of rage is a pretext to avoid the anguished search for the Good.”

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Jean Paul Sartre livre Anti-Semite and Jew

Pages 31-32
Anti-Semite and Jew (1945)

“I entered the [Communist] Party because its cause was just and I will leave it when it ceases to be just.”

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Jean Paul Sartre Les Mains sales

Hugo to Hoederer, Act 5, sc. 3
Dirty Hands (1948)

“Don’t you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.”

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Jean Paul Sartre Huis clos

Estelle, discovering that there are no mirrors in Hell, Act 1, sc. 5
No Exit (1944)

“Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position. Its intention is not in the least that of plunging men into despair. And if by despair one means as the Christians do – any attitude of unbelief, the despair of the existentialists is something different. Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God. In this sense existentialism is optimistic. It is a doctrine of action, and it is only by self-deception, by confining their own despair with ours that Christians can describe us as without hope.”

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Jean Paul Sartre

Existentialism Is a Humanism, lecture (1946)

“Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.”

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Jean Paul Sartre livre Le Diable et le Bon Dieu

Act 10, sc. 2
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

“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.”

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Jean Paul Sartre Les Mouches

Jupiter, Act 3
The Flies (1943)

“…in order to change poverty into wealth, one must start by displaying it.”

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Jean Paul Sartre livre Saint Genet, comédien et martyr

(420).
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

“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.”

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Jean Paul Sartre Les Mouches

Orestes, Act 3
The Flies (1943)

“Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins.”

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Jean Paul Sartre Les Mains sales

Act 5, sc. 3
Dirty Hands (1948)

“A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.”

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Jean Paul Sartre Les Mouches

King Aegistheus, Act 2
The Flies (1943)

“Virtue is the death of conscience because it is the habit of Good, and yet the ethic of the honest man infinitely prefers virtue to the noblest agonies of conscience. Thus, being poses nonbeing and eliminates it. There is only being”

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Jean Paul Sartre livre Saint Genet, comédien et martyr

(402).
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

“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.”

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Jean Paul Sartre livre L'Âge de raison

L'âge de raison (The Age of Reason) (1945)

“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.”

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Jean Paul Sartre livre Saint Genet, comédien et martyr

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)
Source: Book 2, "The Melodious Child Dead in Me"

“…the reality of society involves the socialization of certain unrealities.”

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Jean Paul Sartre livre Saint Genet, comédien et martyr

455
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

“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.”

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Jean Paul Sartre livre Le Diable et le Bon Dieu

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.”

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Jean Paul Sartre livre Saint Genet, comédien et martyr

139
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

“I know only one Church: it is the society of men.”

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Jean Paul Sartre livre Le Diable et le Bon Dieu

Act 1
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

“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!”

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Jean Paul Sartre Les Mouches

Aegistheus, Act 2
The Flies (1943)

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

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Jean Paul Sartre livre Saint Genet, comédien et martyr

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