Jean-Paul Sartre: Citations en anglais (Page 8)

“I mistrust illuminations: what we take for a discovery is very often only a familiar thought that we have not recognized.”

“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.”

“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.”

“His business is here, it is here that he is despised and vilified, it is here that he must carry out his undertaking”

“We are in hell and I will have my turn!”

“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.”

“Since he is unable to be the beloved, he will become the lover.”

“But since he has decided to have the impossibility of living, every misfortune is an opportunity which lays this importance of living before his eyes and obliges him to decide, once again, to die.”

“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.”

“It was a constraint; he makes of it his mission”

“It is not the same thing. You are perhaps not lying, but you are not telling the truth.”

“…and if you are common, you can dress up as a woman, show you behind or write poems: there’s nothing offensive about a naked behind if it’s everybody’s; each person will be mirrored in it.”

“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.”

“One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.”

“As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.”

“The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free, Aegistheus. You know it and they do not.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”