Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Jean-Paul Sartre

Quote by Jean-Paul Sartre

“For many have but one resource to sustain them in their misery, and that is to think, “Circumstances have been against me, I was worthy to be something much better than I have been. I admit I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not the leisure to do so; or, if I have had no children to whom I could devote myself it is because I did not find the man I could have lived with. So there remains within me a wide range of abilities, inclinations and potentialities, unused but perfectly viable, which endow me with a worthiness that could never be inferred from the mere history of my actions.” But in reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art.”

Quote by Jean-Paul Sartre

Work

Existentialism is a Humanism

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher, writer, and playwright, born on June 21, 1905, and died on April 15, 1980. He is considered one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, renowned for his existentialist philosophy. Sartre's works spanned across philosophy, literature, and drama, and had a profound impact on later generations. more

You May Also Like

“Bach represents standing and moving, resting and hurrying, elevation and depression, with a naïveté almost characteristic of the first beginning of art. Without abandoning this minute detail-painting in his later works, his method now becomes, as it were, transfigured. His thought, vision, and emotion have remained unchanged, but in the later works the tone-painting is not so isolated; it is part and parcel of the melodic form that constitutes the basis of his movements, and his genius provided him with themes that contain, in their germ, all the possibilities of expression that the movement will afterwards require.”

“Nowhere so well as in the Well-tempered Clavichord are we made to realise that art was Bach’s religion. He does not depict natural soul-states, like Beethoven in his sonatas, no striving and struggling towards a goal, but the reality of life felt by a spirit always conscious of being superior to life, a spirit in which the most contradictory emotions, wildest grief and exuberant cheerfulness, are simply phases of a fundamental superiority of soul. It is this that gives the same transfigured air to the sorrow laden E flat minor prelude of the First Part and the care-free, volatile prelude in G major in the Second Part. Whoever has once felt this wonderful tranquility has comprehended the mysterious spirit that has here expressed all it knew and felt of life in the secret language of tone, and will render Bach the thanks we render only to the great souls to whom it is given to reconcile men with life and bring them peace.”

“it is sufficient to say, that a chorus of work, the whole of my past life - but, as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if present and incarnated in the music: no longer painful to dwell upon: but the detail of it's incidents removed, or blended in some hazy abstraction; and its passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed. All this was to be had for five shillings.”

“The ideological blackmail that has been in place since the original Live Aid concerts in 1985 has insisted that ‘caring individuals’ could end famine directly, without the need for any kind of political solution or systemic reorganization. It is necessary to act straight away, we were told; politics has to be suspended in the name of ethical immediacy. Bono’s Product Red brand wanted to dispense even with the philanthropic intermediary. ‘Philanthropy is like hippy music, holding hands’, Bono proclaimed. ‘Red is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like hard commerce’. The point was not to offer an alternative to capitalism - on the contrary, Product Red’s ‘punk rock’ or ‘hip hop’ character consisted in its ‘realistic’ acceptance that capitalism is the only game in town. No, the aim was only to ensure that some of the proceeds of particular transactions went to good causes. The fantasy being that western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products.”

“It is often said that Freddie Mercury is "one of the best" showmen in history. To me, he is THE best. Why? Two reasons - he wrote what is generally-considered the greatest song of all-time (Bohemian Rhapsody) AND gave the greatest live performance ever (Live Aid). To do one of those things is extremely difficult, to do both is a genius-level achievement.”