“For man holds his ground only by surpassing himself, in the same sense in which it is said that one ceases to love if one does not love increasingly everyday.”
Source: Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952), p. 238
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Jean Paul Sartre 321
French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, sc… 1905–1980Related quotes
Pierre Fauchery, as quoted by the character "Jules Labarthe"
The Age for Love
Context: There is no such thing as an age for love... because the man capable of loving — in the complex and modern sense of love as a sort of ideal exaltation — never ceases to love. I will go further; he never ceases to love the same person. You know the experiment that a contemporary physiologist tried with a series of portraits to determine in what the indefinable resemblances called family likeness consisted? He took photographs of twenty persons of the same blood, then he photographed these photographs on the same plate, one over the other. In this way he discovered the common features which determined the type. Well, I am convinced that if we could try a similar experiment and photograph one upon another the pictures of the different women whom the same man has loved or thought he had loved in the course of his life we should discover that all these women resembled one another. The most inconsistent have cherished one and the same being through five or six or even twenty different embodiments.
“I said only one word, brought only one message: Love. Love — nothing else.”
The Last Temptation of Christ (1951), p. 478
“We cease loving ourselves if no one loves us.”
On cesse de s'aimer si quelqu'un ne nous aime.
Sophie, or The Secret Sentiments (Sophie, ou les sentiments secrets, 1790), Act 2, sc. 8
Source: Black Skin, White Masks
“Thus they are destitute of that very lovely and exquisitely natural friendship, which is an object of desire in itself and for itself, nor can they learn from themselves how valuable and powerful such a friendship is. For each man loves himself, not that he may get from himself some reward for his own affection, but because each one is of himself dear to himself. And unless this same feeling be transferred to friendship, a true friend will never be found; for a true friend is one who is, as it were, a second self.”
Ita pulcherrima illa et maxime naturali carent amicitia per se et propter se expetita nec ipsi sibi exemplo sunt, haec vis amicitiae et qualis et quanta sit. Ipse enim se quisque diligit, non ut aliquam a se ipse mercedem exigat caritatis suae, sed quod per se sibi quisque carus est. Quod nisi idem in amicitiam transferetur, verus amicus numquam reperietur; est enim is qui est tamquam alter idem.
Section 80; translation by J. F. Stout
Laelius De Amicitia – Laelius On Friendship (44 BC)
[2003, Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, World Wisdom, 220, 978-0-94153227-3]
Spiritual life, Happiness
