Sartre(the Atheist) seem to have said near his death:
{I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.}
Before this realization,the man and his mental tug of war:
Hell is other people."from No Exit
I agree, I disagree.
Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.
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?
Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.
Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind. 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.
What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal…. For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space.
The more one is absorbed in fighting evil, the less one is tempted to place the good in question.
NAUSEA
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.
People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?
I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.
As for the square at Meknes, where I used to go every day, it's even simpler: I do not see it at all anymore. All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words that are indivisibly bound together: a charming square at Meknes. … I don't see anything any more: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction. 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.
I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.
I wanted for the moments in my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. It would be just as well to try to catch time by the tail. As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.
I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape. The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist. The past is the luxury of proprietors. Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?
On my way to the office in the morning, there are, in front of me, behind me, other men going to their jobs. I see them; if I dared, I would smile at them. I think to myself that I am a socialist, that they are the purpose of my life, of my efforts and that they do not know it yet.
For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.
For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, just notes, a myriad 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 may 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.
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
Absurd, irreducible; nothing—not even a profound and secret delirium of nature—could explain [a tree root]. How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?
I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
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.
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.
Nothingness haunts being.
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. Life has no meaning a priori … It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose. It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.
The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure nihilation of the In-itself; it is like a hole of being at the heart of Being.
Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not. He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to recover his inner being. All human actions are equivalent ... and ... all are on principle doomed to failure.
THE FLIES
But [your crime] will be there, one hundred times denied, always there, dragging itself behind you. Then you will finally know that you have committed your life with one throw of the die, once and for all, and there is nothing you can do but tug our crime along until your death. Such is the law, just and unjust, of repentance. Then we will see what will become of your young pride.
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. Some men are born committed to action: they do not have a choice, they have been thrown on a path, at the end of that path, an act awaits them, their act.
Her face seems ravaged by both lightning and hail. But on yours there is something like the promise of a storm: one day passion will burn it to the bone. I felt less alone when I didn’t know you yet: I was waiting for the other. I thought only of his strength and never of my weakness. And now here you are, Orestes, it was you. I look at you and I see that we are two orphans.
Understand me: I wish to be a man from somewhere, a man among men. You see, a slave, when he passes by, weary and surly, carrying a heavy load, limping along and looking down at his feet, only at his feet to avoid falling down; he is in his town, like a leaf in greenery, like a tree in a forest, argos surrounds him, heavy and warm, full of herself; I want to be that slave, Electra, I want to pull the city around me and to roll myself up in it like a blanket. I will not leave.
Now I am weary and I can no longer tell good from Evil, and I need someone to show me the way.
We were too light, Electra. Now our feet press down in the earth like the wheels of a cart in its groove. Come with me, and we will walk heavily, bending under the weight of our heavy load.
NO EXIT
I will take it all: tongs, molten lead, prongs, garrotes, all that burns, all that tears, I want to truly suffer. Better one hundred bites, better the whip, vitriol, than this suffering in the head, this ghost of suffering which grazes and caresses and never hurts enough.
If we must absolutely mention this state of affairs, I suggest that we call ourselves “absent”, that is more proper.It is better; heavier, crueler. The mouth you wear for hell.
You have stolen my face from me: you know it and I no longer do.
One always dies too soon—or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life. 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.
DIRTY HANDS
They made me take cod liver oil: that is the height of luxury: a medicine to make you hungry while the others, in the street, would have sold themselves for a beefsteak. I saw them passing my window with their signs: “Give me bread”.
I was your luxury. For nineteen years I have been put in your man’s world and was forbidden to touch anything and you made me think that all was going very well and that I did not have to worry about anything but putting flowers in vases. Why did you lie to me? Why did you keep me ignorant, if it was to admit to me one day that this world is cracking and that you are all powerless and to make me choose between a suicide and a murder?
Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.
I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.
As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
You take souls for vegetables.... The gardener can decide what will become of his carrots but no one can choose the good of others for them.
The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.
THE DEVIL AND THE GOOD LORD
If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light.
If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat. It is not the same thing. You are perhaps not lying, but you are not telling the truth.
I do not understand! I understand nothing! I cannot understand nor do I want to understand! I want to believe! To Believe!
When the rich make war, it's the poor that die.
Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.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.
Thus man defines himself in relationship to this ignorance.he defines what he is and what he seeks in terms of it.
If you want to deserve Hell, you need only stay in bed.
The world is iniquity; if you accept it, you are an accomplice, if you change it you are an executioner.
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.
Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
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.
