Sartre Quotes

“Sartre is interested in man not so much as a ‘rational’ being but as a ‘reflective’ being: self-picturing, self-deceiving, and acutely aware of the regard of others. How does Sartre set about describing our consciousness, or our ‘being’? We have already encountered the recurrent image, incarnated particularly in Roquentin and Daniel, of the consciousness (pour-soi) as a sort of uneasy void (néant) lying between a state of unreflective solidification (en-soi) and an ideal but impossible condition of fully reflective self-contemplative stability (en-soi-pour-soi). I shall now try to give a clearer philosophical sense to this image. We”
― Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

“That the novel comments on society is on the whole true. It is also easy to see why prose literature in general and the novel in particular are most suited to ‘commitment’ (engagement), the transforming of the appeal to ‘freedom’ which is made by all art into a more specific kind of social recommendation. What is surprising, particularly after the introduction to Sartre’s thought afforded by L’Etre et”
― Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

“L’homme est une passion inutile. To understand this is to rid ourselves of the bad faith of the esprit de sérieux.”
― Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

“Man is the being who aspires to be God’, Sartre writes (p. 653), and at the close of L’Etre et le Néant he embroiders rhetorically upon this theme. The passion of man is the opposite of that of Christ. Man is to lose himself as a man in order that God shall be born; that”
― Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

“self-contradictory. Such a condition, that of being en-soi-pour-soi, Sartre later says (p.653) is the condition of being God: it is not a possible human condition. A sense of value then is a sense of lack, the lack of a certain completeness; and the reflective consciousness which reveals to us this lack (under the eye of which what we are shrivels, as it were, to nothing) is properly called a moral consciousness.”
― Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

“steady, and complete, without losing its self-aware transparency: the expressive immobility of the statue, the timeless motion of the melody, are images of this steadiness. Consciousness is rupture, it is able to spring out of unreflective thing-like conditions—but it is also projet, it aspires towards a wholeness which forever haunts its partial state.”
― Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

“is in terms of a dispersion of this gluey inertness that Sartre pictures freedom; ‘freedom’ is the mobility of the consciousness, that is our ability to reflect, to dispel an emotional condition, to withdraw from absorption in the world, to set things at a distance.”
― Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

“could tell him what to do. “I am free for nothing”, he thought with lassitude’ (p. 286). This is typical of Mathieu’s reflexions. At the crises in his life, it is the same note of emptiness and weariness which is struck always. At the close of L’Age de Raison, after his break with Marcelle: ‘He felt nothing except an anger without an object and behind him the act, naked, smooth, incomprehensible: he had stolen, he had abandoned Marcelle when she was pregnant, for nothing’ (p. 288).”
― Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist