The Words Quotes

“I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“I confused things with their names: that is belief.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“J'ai commencé ma vie comme je la finirai sans doute : au milieu des livres.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“I had been born in order to fill
the great need I had of myself.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“وكان الأبطال يكافؤون ويكرمون ويعجب بهم ويتلقون المال.وكانت الفتاه تقع في حب المستكشف الذي أنقذ حياتها,وكل شيء كان ينتهي بالزواج .لقد استنتجت من هذه المجلات ومن هذه الكتب ..خيالي المستقر في أعماقي وهو التفاءل”
― جان بول سارتر, الكلمات

“J'étais un enfant, ce monstre qu'ils fabriquent avec leurs regrets.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“I go to the window, I spot a fly under the curtain, I corner it in a muslin trap and move a murderous forefinger toward it. This moment is not in the program, it's something apart, timeless, incomparable, motionless, nothing will come of it this evening or later . . . Mankind is asleep. . . . Alone and without a future in a stagnant moment, a child is asking murder for strong sensations. Since I'm refused a man's destiny, I'll be the destiny of a fly. I don't rush matters, I'm letting it have time enough to become aware of the giant bending over it. I move my finger forward, the fly bursts, I'm foiled! Good God, I shouldn't have killed it! It was the only being in all creation that feared me; I no longer mean anything to anyone. I, the insecticide, take the victim's place and become an insect myself. I'm a fly, I've always been one. This time I've touched bottom.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“I wanted to be missed, like water, like bread, like air, by all other people in all other places.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“I was the beginning, the middle and the end all rolled into one small boy, already old, already dead, here, in the shadows, between the stacks of plates higher than himself, and outside, very far away, in the cast and gloomy sunshine of glory. I was the particle at the beginning of its trajectory and the series of waves which flows back on it after it has struck the terminal buffer. Reassembled and compressed, one hand on my tomb and the other on my cradle, I felt brief and splendid, a flash of lightening swallowed up in darkness.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“Madame Picard believed that a child should be allowed to read anything: 'A book never does any harm if it is well written.' While she was there, I had once asked permission to read Madame Bovary and my mother, in an oversweet voice, had said: 'But if my darling reads books like that at his age, what will he do when he grows up?' 'I shall live them!' This reply had met with the most complete and lasting success.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“Moi, je ne tiens pas les rancunes et j'avoue tout, complaisamment : pour l'autocritique, je suis doué, à la condition qu'on ne prétende pas me l'imposer.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“J'avais deux raisons de respecter mon instituteur : il me voulait du bien, il avait l'haleine forte.
Les grandes personnes doivent être laides, ridées, incommodes; quand elles me prenaient dans leurs bras, il ne me déplaisait pas d'avoir un léger dégoût à surmonter : c'était la preuve que la vertu n'était pas facile. Il y avait des joies simples, triviales : courir, sauter, manger des gâteaux, embrasser la peau douce et parfumée de ma mère; mais j'attachais plus de prix aux plaisirs studieux et mêlés que j'éprouvais dans la compagnie des hommes mûrs : la répulsion qu'ils m'inspiraient faisait partie de leur prestige ; je confondais le dégoût avec l'esprit de sérieux. J'étais snob.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“I began my life as I shall no doubt end it: among books. In my grandfather's study, they were everywhere; it was forbidden to dust them except once a year, before the October term. Even before I could read, I already revered these raised stones; upright or leaning, wedged together like bricks on the library shelves or nobly placed like avenues of dolmens, I felt that our family prosperity depended on them. They were all alike, and I was romping about in a tiny sanctuary, surrounded by squat, ancient monuments which had witnessed my birth, which would witness my death and whose permanence guaranteed me a future as calm as my past. I used to touch them in secret to honour my hands with their dust but I did not have much idea what to do with them and each day I was present at ceremonies whose meaning escaped me: my grandfather - so clumy, normally, that my grandmother buttoned his gloves for him - handled these cultural objects with the dexterity of an officiating priest. Hundreds of times I saw him get up absent-mindedly, walk round the table, cross the room in two strides, unhesitatingly pick out a volume without allowing himself time for choice, run through it as he went back to his armchair, with a combined movement of his thumb and right forefinger, and, almost before he sat down, open it with a flick "at the right page," making it creak like a shoe. I sometimes got close enough to observe these boxes which opened like oysters and I discovered the nakedness of their internal organs, pale, dank, slightly blistering pages, covered with small black veins, which drank ink and smelt of mildew.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“Je n'ai jamais gratté la terre ni quêté des nids, je n'ai pas herborisé ni lancé des pierres aux oiseaux. Mais les livres ont été mes oiseaux et mes nids, mes bêtes domestiques, mon étable et ma campagne.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“It is no good putting yourself in the dead man's shoes, pretending to share his passions, his blunders, and his prejudices, reawakening vanished moments of strength, impatience, or apprehension; you cannot help assessing his behaviour in light of results which he could not foresee and of information which he did not possess, or attributing a particular solemnity to events whose effects marked him later, but which he lived through casually. That is the mirage: the future is more real than the present. It is not surprising: in a completed life, the end is taken as the truth of the beginning. The dead man stands half-way between being and worth, between the crude fact and its reconstruction: his history becomes a kind of circular essence which is summed up in each of his moments.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“Quelquefois je m'approchais pour observer ces boîtes qui se fendaient comme des huîtres et je découvrais la nudité de leurs organes intérieurs, des feuilles blêmes et moisies, légèrement boursouflées, couvertes de veinules noires, qui buvaient l'encre et sentaient le champignon.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“Fabrikalar, kırsal alanı mahvediyordu ve büyükbabam, soyut bilimlerde yalnızca soyutluğu seviyordu.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“Oysa sevmişti o, yaşamak istemişti ve kendini ölürken görmüştü; bunlar bir insanın insan olmasına yeter.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“Aujourd'hui encore, je ne puis voir sans plaisir un enfant trop sérieux parler gravement, tendrement à sa mère enfant; j'aime ces douces amitiés sauvages qui naissent loin des hommes et contre eux.
Je regarde longuement ces couples puérils et puis je me rappelle que je suis un homme et je détourne la tête.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“Yet he loved, he wanted to live, he saw himself dying; that is enough to make a whole man.

Il a aimé, pourtant, il a voulu vivre, il s'est vu mourir; cela suffit pour faire tout un homme.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“My bones are leather and cardboard, my parchment smells of glue and mildew, and I strut at my ease across a hundredweight of paper. I am reborn, I have at last become a complete man, thinking, speaking, singing, thundering, and asserting himself with the peremptory inertia of matter. I am taken up, opened out, spread on the table, smoothed with the flat of the hand and sometimes made to crack. I let it happen and then suddenly I flash, dazzle, impose myself from a distance; my powers traverse space and time, strike down the wicked and protect the good. No one can forget me or pass me over in silence: I am a large, manageable, and terrible fetish. My consciousness is in fragments: all the better. Other consciousnesses have taken charge of me. They read me and I leap to their eyes; they talk about me and I am on everyone’s lips, a universal and singular language; I have made myself a prospective interest for millions of glances. For anyone who knows how to like me, I am his most intimate disquiet: but if he wants to touch me, I draw aside and vanish: I exist nowhere but I am, at last! I am everywhere: a parasite on humanity, by my good deeds I prey on it and force it endlessly to revive my absence.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“even today, I would rather read ‘thrillers’ than Wittgenstein.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“At the age of twenty, without experience or advice, my mother was torn between two moribund creatures. Her marriage of convenience found its truth in sickness and mourning... Upon the death of my father, Anne-Marie and I awoke from a common nightmare. I got better. But we were both victims of a misunderstanding: she returned lovingly to the child she had never left; I regained consciousness in the lap of a stranger.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“Si l'on ne se définit qu'en s'opposant, j'étais l'indéfini en chair et en os; si l'amour et la haine sont l'avers et le revers de la même médaille, je n'aimais rien ni personne. C'était bien fait: on ne peut pas demander à la fois de haïr et de plaire. Ni de plaire et d'aimer.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots

“Aujourd'hui, je leur donne raison : ils avaient tout accepté de notre condition, même l'inquiétude ; j'avais choisi d'être rassuré ; et c'était bien vrai, au fond, que je me croyais immortel : je m'étais tué d'avance parce que les défunts sont seuls à jouir de l'immortalité.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots

“Bref, il me jeta dans la littérature par le soin qu'il mit à m'en détourner : au point qu'il m'arrive aujourd'hui encore, de me demande, quand je suis de mauvaise humeur, si je n'ai pas consommé tant de jours et tant de nuits, couvert tant de feuillets de mon encre, jeté sur le marché tant de livres qui n'étaient souhaités par personne, dans l'unique et fol espoir de plaire à mon grand-père. Ce serait farce : à plus de cinquante ans, je me trouverais embarqué, pour accomplir les volontés d'un très vieux mort, dans une entreprise qu'il ne manquerait pas de désavouer.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots

“Suis-je donc un Narcisse ? Pas même : trop soucieux de séduire, je m'oublie. Après tout, ça ne m'amuse pas tant de faire des pâtés, des gribouillages, mes besoins naturels : pour leur donner du prix à mes yeux, il faut qu'au moins une grande personne s'extasie sur mes produits.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots

“Културата не спасява нищо и никого, нито пък осмисля. Но е дело на човека - той се отразява в нея, разпознава се; единствено тя е критичното огледало, което му предлага неговия образ.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“Я попался в ловушку, склонность к добродетели пробудила во мне нежность к дьяволу.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“Vaikai ir kareiviai apie mirusius negalvoja.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre