33 quotes
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970)
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.
The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
All metaphysical theories are inconclusively vulnerable to positivist attack.
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953)
The only satisfied rationalists today are blinkered scientists or Marxists.
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953)
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
The Message to the Planet (1989)
Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires.
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
The novel, the novel proper that is, is about people's treatment of each other, and so it is about human values.
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953)
Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
A Severed Head (1961)
The role of philosophy might be said to be to extend and deepen the self-awareness of mankind.
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953)
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wave-length of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
The Message to the Planet (1989)
Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
The Nice and the Good (1968)
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
A Severed Head (1961)
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974)
I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.
The Message to the Planet (1989)
The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
The Message to the Planet (1989)
Almost anything that consoles us is a fake.
The Sovereignty of Good (1970)
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
The Black Prince (1973)