“If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.”
Interview (1960), Quoted in Susan Sontag's introduction to Barthes: Selected Writings, “Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes,” (1982)
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Jean Paul Sartre 321
French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, sc… 1905–1980Related quotes

Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: I believe that world literature has it in its power to help mankind, in these its troubled hours, to see itself as it really is, notwithstanding the indoctrinations of prejudiced people and parties. World literature has it in its power to convey condensed experience from one land to another so that we might cease to be split and dazzled, that the different scales of values might be made to agree, and one nation learn correctly and concisely the true history of another with such strength of recognition and painful awareness as it had itself experienced the same, and thus might it be spared from repeating the same cruel mistakes.

“Every single individual worth what he thinks he is worth.”
Original: Ogni singolo individuo vale quanto pensa di valere.
Source: prevale.net

I know, for already we of Philistia have been pestered by three of these makers of literature. Yes, there was Edgar, whom I starved and hunted until I was tired of it: then I chased him up a back alley one night, and knocked out those annoying brains of his. And there was Walt, whom I chivvied and battered from place to place, and made a paralytic of him: and him, too, I labelled offensive and lewd and lascivious and indecent. Then later there was Mark, whom I frightened into disguising himself in a clown's suit, so that nobody might suspect him to be a maker of literature: indeed, I frightened him so that he hid away the greater part of what he had made until after he was dead, and I could not get at him. That was a disgusting trick to play on me, I consider. Still, these are the only three detected makers of literature that have ever infested Philistia, thanks be to goodness and my vigilance, but for both of which we might have been no more free from makers of literature than are the other countries.…
The Judging of Jurgen (1920)

“The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.”

“A hundred girls aren't worth a single testicle.”
Attributed on the internet; a popular Vietnamese saying
Misattributed, Not Chinese
“Troubles also pass, as everything passes, without trouble.”
Las dificultades también pasan, como todo pasa, sin dificultad.
Voces (1943)

“Scarcely anything in literature is worth a damn except what is written between the lines.”