Quote collection
464 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Words There is no good father, that's the rule. Don't lay the blame on men but on the bond of paternity, which is rotten. To beget children, nothing better; to have them, what iniquity!"
"I wrote in Les Mots that "I have often thought against myself." That sentence has not been understood either. Critics have seen in it a confession of masochism. But that is how one should think: revolting against everything "inculcated'' that one may have within oneself."
"I have nothing but contempt for you idiotic chosen ones who have the heart to rejoice when there are the damned in Hell and the poor on earth; as for me, I am on the side of men and I will not leave it."
"To be responsible is to be the uncontested author of an event or thing."
"Then I realized what separated us: what I thought about him could not reach him; it was psychology, the kind they write about in books. But his judgment went through me like a sword and questioned my very right to exist. And it was true, I had always realized it; I hadn't the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe. My life put out feelers towards small pleasures in every direction. Sometimes it sent out vague signals; at other times I felt nothing more than a harmless buzzing."
"I am not asking for sensational revelations, but I would like to sense the meaning of that minute, to feel it's urgency."
"From the period when I wrote La Nausea I wanted to create a morality. My evolution consists in my no longer dreaming of doing so."
"[Stéphane Mallarmé] theory of the hermetic is a mistake, but he can be only difficult to read when he has difficult things to say."
"The public, too, has to make an effort in order to understand the writer who, though he renounce complacent obscurity, cannot always express his new-hidden thoughts lucidly and according to accepted models."
"In Guinea I could read [Franz] Kafka. I re-discover in him my own discomfort."
"That of War and Peace or of Almagestes. All are satisfactory. The only criterion of a work is its validity: that it should grip and that it should last."
"[Andre] Gide can say it to me: it is a writer's morality only addressed to a few privileged people. For that reason it no longer interests me."
"For forty years I was conscripted by the absolute, the neurosis. The absolute is gone. There remain countless tasks among which literature is in no way privileged."
"I admire [Samuel] Beckett, but I am totally against him. He seeks no improvement."
"We do not wish to say only that a man is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for that of all men."
"I have always been an optimist, perhaps even too much."
"As long as the writer cannot write for the two billion men who are hungry, he will be oppressed by a feeling of malaise."
"Man's existence precedes his essence"
"emotion is first of all and in principle an accident"
"First all men must be able to become men by the improvement of their conditions of existence, so that a universal morality can be created. If I begin by saying to them: "Thou shalt not lie," there is no longer any possibility of political action. What matters first is the liberation of man."