Alors, c’est ça l’enfer. Je n’aurais jamais cru… vous vous rappelez: le soufre, le bûcher, le gril… ah! Quelle plaisanterie. Pas besoin de gril, l’enfer, c’est les autres.
- So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: Hell is other people.
The homosexual never thinks of himself when someone is branded in his presence with the name homosexual. …His sexual tastes will doubtless lead him to enter into relationships with this suspect category, but he would like to make use of them without being likened to them. Here, too, the ban that is cast on certain men by society has destroyed all possibility of reciprocity among them. Shame isolates.
I am responsible for everything … except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being. Therefore everything takes place as if I were compelled to be responsible. I am abandoned in the world … in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.
There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.
It is the good children, Madame, who make the most terrible revolutionaries. They say nothing, they do not hide under the table, they eat only one sweet at a time, but later on, they make Society pay dearly for it!
What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.
Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse.
Je suis condamné à être libre.. – I am condemned to be free..
Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.
If you seek authenticity for authenticity’s sake, you are no longer authentic.
I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.
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.
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.
It is no longer possible to escape men. Farewell to the monsters, farewell to the saints. Farewell to pride. All that is left is men.
L’homme est une passion inutile.. – Man is a useless passion..
Like all dreamers, I confuse disenchantment with truth.
I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.
You see,I divide men into three categories: those who have a lot of money, those who have none at all and those who have a little. The first want to keep what they have: their interest is to maintain order; the second want to take what they do not have: their interest is to destroy the existing order and to establish one which is profitable to them. They each are realist, people with whom one can agree. The third group want to overthrow the social order to take what they do not have, while still preserving it so that no one takes away what they have. Thus, they preserve in fact what they destroy in theory, or they destroy in fact what they seem to preserve. Those are the idealists.
A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.
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.
The French bourgeois doesn’t dislike shit, provided it is served up to him at the right time.
All human activities are equivalent … and … all are on principle doomed to failure.
The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.
Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.
As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished.
Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins.
I have nothing but contempt for you idiotic chosen ones who have the heart to rejoice when there are the damned in Hell and the poor on earth; as for me, I am on the side of men and I will not leave it.
He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.
In order to make myself recognized by the Other, I must risk my own life. To risk one’s life, in fact, is to reveal oneself as not-bound to the objective form or to any determined existense–as not-bound to life.
Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.
As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
If you die, I will lie down beside you and I will stay there until the end, without eating or drinking, you will rot in my arms and I will love you as carcass: for you love nothing if you do not love everything.
When the rich make war, it’s the poor that die.
I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.
I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it’s quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don’t do it. I know I’ll never jump again.
For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, just notes, a myriad of tiny tremors. The notes know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them then destroys them, without ever leaving them the chance to recuperate and exist for themselves…. I would like to hold them back, but I know that, if I succeeded in stopping one, there would only remain in my hand a corrupt and languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even want that death: I know of few more bitter or intense impressions.
Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.
God is the solitude of men. There was only me: I alone decided to commit Evil; alone, I invented Good. I am the one who cheated, I am the one who performed miracles, I am the one accusing myself today, I alone can absolve myself; me, the man.
Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away…. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.
If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.
I grasp at each second, trying to suck it dry: nothing happens which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever in myself, nothing, neither the fugitive tenderness of those lovely eyes, nor the noises of the street, nor the false dawn of early morning: and even so the minute passes and I do not hold it back, I like to see it pass.
It is not the same thing. You are perhaps not lying, but you are not telling the truth.
What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?
Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.
I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.
When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell a story: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow by too: you suddenly see people appear who speak and then go away; you plunge into stories of which you can’t make head or tail: you’d make a terrible witness.
She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.
We will freedom for freedom’s sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.
If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.
We are among murderers. We are in hell, my dear, there is never a mistake and people are not damned for nothing.
To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.
The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.
You are a tiny little girl, Electra. Other little girls dreamed of being the richest or the most beautiful women of all. And you, fascinated by the horrid destiny of your people, you wished to become the most pained and the most criminal … At your age, children still play with dolls and they play hopscotch. You, poor child, without toys or playmates, you played murder, because it is a game that one can play alone.
And we feel that the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations, promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to all that did not herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the man was walking in the night without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of dull rich prizes, and he did not make his choice.
All-powerful god, who am I but the fear that I inspire in others?
The more one is absorbed in fighting evil, the less one is tempted to place the good in question.