216 quotes
Ah! How I hate the crimes of the new generation: they are dry and sterile as darnel.
The Flies (1943)
It is better; heavier, crueler. The mouth you wear for hell.
No Exit (1944)
If you die, I will lie down beside you and I will stay there until the end, without eating or drinking, you will rot in my arms and I will love you as carcass: for you love nothing if you do not love everything.
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)
I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good.
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)
As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.
Nausea (1938)
For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.
Nausea (1938)
The consciousness of being betrayed is to the collective consciousness of a sacred group what a certain form of schizophrenia is to the individual...it is a form of madness.
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)
Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
esse est percipi, and he recognizes himself as being only insofar as he is perceived.
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)
in order to make himself thoroughly undesirable, he will speak.
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)
So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: Hell is other people.
No Exit (1944)
It is the good children, Madame, who make the most terrible revolutionaries. They say nothing, they do not hide under the table, they eat only one sweet at a time, but later on, they make Society pay dearly for it!
Dirty Hands (1948)
How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?
Nausea (1938)
I do not understand! I understand nothing! I cannot understand nor do I want to understand! I want to believe! To Believe!
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)
To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.
...the reality of society involves the socialization of certain unrealities.
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)
...in order to change poverty into wealth, one must start by displaying it.
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)
...inversion...is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
Nausea (1938)
People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?
Nausea (1938)