Jean Paul Sartre, born June 21, 1905, Paris, France, died April 15, 1980, Paris. French writer and philosopher. A leading , he wrote literary works, such as the autobiographical novel Nausea (1938) and the play No Exit (1944), and philosophical volumes that include Being and Nothingness (1943). Sartre declined the 1964 Nobel Prize for literature.
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.
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.
The existentialist is strongly opposed to a certain kind of secular ethics which would like to abolish God with the least possible expense.
The existentialist...thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be a priori of God, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is that we are on a plane where there are only men. Dostoyevsky said, If God didn't exist, everything would be possible. That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to.
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
Should I betray the proletariat to serve truth or betray truth in the name of the proletariat?
More Quotes by Jean Paul Sartre: Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
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