No Exit and Three Other Plays Quotes

“Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“Man is what he wills himself to be.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“I’ve dropped out of their hearts like a little sparrow fallen from its nest. So gather me up, dear, fold me to your heart – and you’ll see how nice I can be.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“Love or hatred calls for self-surrender. He cuts a fine figure, the warm-blooded, prosperous man, solidly entrenched in his well-being, who one fine day surrenders all to love—or to hatred; himself, his house, his land, his memories.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“Why do you keep maintaining your ideas are right if you can't prove them?”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom—ah the soul-destroying boredom—of long days of mild content.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“Let it crumble! Let the rocks revile me and flowers wilt at my coming. Your whole universe is not enough to prove me wrong. You are the king of gods, king of stones and stars, king of the waves of the sea. But you are not the king of man.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“You see, I'm fond of teasing, it's
a second nature with me—and I'm used to teasing myself. Plaguing myself, if you prefer; I don't tease nicely.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“At an age when most children are playing hopscotch or with their dolls,you, poor child, who had no friends or toys, you toyed with dreams of murder, because that is a game to play alone.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“It's your weakness gives them their strength. Mark how they dare not speak to me. A nameless horror has descended on you, keeping us apart. And yet why should this be? What have you lived through that I have not shared? Do you imagine that my mother's cries will ever cease ringing in my ears? Or that my eyes will ever cease to see her great sad eyes, lakes of lambent darkness in the pallor of it will ever cease ravaging my heart? But what matter? I am free. Beyond anguish, beyond remorse. Free. And at one with myself. No, you must not loathe yourself, Electra. Give me your hand. I shall never forsake you.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“Höderer: You don't love men, Hugo. You love only principles.
Hugo: Men? Why should I love them? Do they love me?
Höderer: Then why did you come to us? If you don't love men, you can't fight for them.
Hugo: I joined the party because its cause is just, and I shall leave it when that cause ceases to be just. As for men, it's not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
Höderer: And I, I love them for what they are. With all their filth and and all their vices. I love their voices and their warm grasping hands, and their skin, the nudest skin of all, and their uneasy glances, and the desperate struggle each has to pursue against anguish and against death. For me, one man more or less in the world is something that counts. It's something precious. You, I know you now, you are a destroyer. You detest men because you detest yourself. Your purity resembles death. The revolution you dream of is not ours. You don't want to change the world, you want to blow it up.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“a wise person can want nothing better from life than to pay back the wrong that has been done him.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“She is dearer to me than life. But her suffering comes from within, and only she can rid herself of it. For she is free.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“Outside nature, against nature, without excuse, beyond remedy, except what remedy I find within myself.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“You didn't succeed. Well, what of that? There's nothing to prove, you know, and the revolution's not a question of virtue but of effectiveness. There is no heaven. There's work to be done, that's all. And you must do what you're cut out for; all the better if it comes easy to you. The best work is not the work that takes the most sacrifice. It's the work in which you can best succeed.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“The first crime was mine: I committed it when I made man mortal. Once I had done that, what was left for you, poor human murderers, to do? To kill your victims? But they already had the seed of death in them; all you could do was to hasten its fruition by a year or two.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“Wait a minute, there's a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why, now, should it be disagreeable?...Ah,I see; it's life without a break.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“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.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre , No Exit and Three Other Plays

“You have to talk to make sure you're alive.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“And you know what wickedness is, and shame, and fear. There were days when you peered into yourself, into the secret places of your heart, and what you saw there made you faint with horror.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“When I can't see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself just to make sure, but it doesn't help much.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“So gather me up, dear, fold me to your heart – and you’ll see how nice I can be.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“And you, fathers and mothers, loving par-ents, lower your eyes humbly. They are there, your dead children, stretching their frail arms towards you, and all the happiness you denied them, all the tortures you inflicted, weigh like lead on their sad, childish, unforgiving hearts.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“The words I speak are too big for my mouth, they tear it; the load of destiny I bear is too heavy for my youth and has shattered it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“I've dropped out of their hearts like a little sparrow fallen from its nest.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“To forget about the others? How utterly absurd! I feel you there, in every pore. Your silence clamors in my ears. You can nail up your mouth, cut your tongue out - but you can't prevent your being there.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“On this Earth that bleeds, all joy is obscene, and all happy men must live alone”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“Neither sad nor gay is the desert—a boundless waste of sand under a burning waste of sky.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“I feel so queer. Don’t you ever get taken that way? When I can’t see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself just to make sure, but it doesn’t help much.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays