Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre:
( 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980 )
French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology).
To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June.
Possession is a friendship between man and things.
To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June.
What the theater can show most movingly is a character in the making, the moment of choice, of the free decision which engages a whole morality and a whole life.
Every word has consequences, every silence too.
I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.
It is in anguish that man becomes conscious of his freedom.
Man is not sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.
I’m always conscious of myself—in my mind. Painfully conscious.
There is no such thing as a given freedom; you have to conquer your passions, your race, your class, your nation, and conquer other men along with you.
Once freedom has exploded in a man’s soul, the gods can do nothing more against him.
Duty is the will of the other within me, the alienation of my own freedom.
Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.
With despair, true optimism begins: the optimism of the man who expects nothing, who knows he has no rights and nothing coming to him, who rejoices in counting on himself alone and in acting alone for the good of all.
What he means by the statement (or the paraphrase thereof) is typical of Sartre: despair (in the sense of no hope for external salvation) is not passive, but rather the beginning of a radical optimism rooted in personal responsibility and action for a broader human interest.
