841 Quotes by Jean-Paul Sartre

I took everything as seriously as if I were immortal.

Madame Picard believed that a child should be allowed to read anything: 'A book never does any harm if it is well written.' While she was there, I had once asked permission to read Madame Bovary and my mother, in an oversweet voice, had said: 'But if my darling reads books like that at his age, what will he do when he grows up?' 'I shall live them!' This reply had met with the most complete and lasting success.

I am not listening to him any more, but hemust have strayed from his original subject because I suddenly hear:". . . to have, as you, the good fortune of writing a book." I have to say something. "Good fortune," I say, dubiously.He mistakes the sense of my answer and rapidly corrects himself:"Monsieur, I should have said: 'merit.

For a consciousness to be capable of imagining…it needs to be free.

What he [the intellectual] should learn to do is to put what he has been able to salvage from the disciplines that taught him universal techniques, directly at the service of the masses. Intellectuals must learn to understand the universal that the masses want, in reality, in the immediate, at this very moment.

We still have not defined the intellectual yet: all we have are technicians of practical knowledge who either accommodate themselves to their contradiction or manage to avoid suffering from it. But when one of them becomes aware of the fact that despite the universality of his work it serves only particular interests, then his awareness of this contradiction - what Hegel called an 'unhappy consciousness' - is precisely what characterizes him as an intellectual.

And naturally, everything they tell about in books can happen in real life, but not in the same way. It is to this way of happeningthat I clung so tightly.

They are young and well built, they have another thirty years ahead of them. So they don't hurry, they take their time, and they are quite right. Once they have been to bed together, they will have to find something else to conceal the enormous absurdity of their existence.

Man is a useless passion. It is meaningless that we live and it is meaningless that we die.