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Quotes from Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr — Jean-Paul Sartre

1905–1980 France

← All quotes by Jean-Paul Sartre

44 quotes

For those who want 'to change life", 'to reinvent love,' God is nothing but a hindrance.

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

The French bourgeois doesn't dislike shit, provided it is served up to him at the right time.

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

L’important n’est pas ce qu’on fait de nous mais ce que nous faisons nous-même de ce qu’on a fait de nous.

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

For Genet, Beauty will be the offensive weapon that will enable him to beat the just on their own ground: that of value.

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

Since he is unable to be the beloved, he will become the lover.

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

In doing Good, I lose myself in Being, I abandon my particularity, I become a universal subject.

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

Similarly, individual acts of aristocratic generosity do not eliminate pauperism; they perpetuate it.

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

His business is here, it is here that he is despised and vilified, it is here that he must carry out his undertaking

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

I mistrust illuminations: what we take for a discovery is very often only a familiar thought that we have not recognized.

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

He chooses the most feared, most hated man in order to worship him as a god, feeling sure that he is alone in perceiving the god's secret virtues.

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

For man holds his ground only by surpassing himself, in the same sense in which it is said that one ceases to love if one does not love increasingly everyday.

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

This inner revolution is realistic because it maintains itself deliberately within the framework of existing institutions; the oppressed reckon with the real situation.

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

For Genet, reflective states of mind are the rule. And although they are of an unstable nature in everyone, in him...reflection is always contrary to the reflected feeling.

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

It is freedom, it is particularity, it is solitude that we are aiming at, and not Evil for its own sake

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

Genet is a man-failure: he wills the impossible in order to derive from the tragic grandeur of this defeat the assurance that there is something other than the possible.

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

But since he has decided to have the impossibility of living, every misfortune is an opportunity which lays this importance of living before his eyes and obliges him to decide, once again, to die.

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

The world is sacred because it gives an inkling of a meaning that escapes us

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

The live dead-man is dead as a producer and alive insofar as he consumes

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

The worst of misfortunes is still a stroke of luck, since one feels oneself living when one experiences it

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Jean-Paul Sartre (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.