nopersuasion

It was better for me when I could imagine greatness in others, even if it wasn’t always there.

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

The only people who intrigue us are those who know everything or don’t know anything. The people who destroyed themselves trying to pursue their desires, give up freedom, become slaves to their avidity, making the gods fear their cravings. People with hellacious passion and understanding, people who are unable to comprehend society, untouched by trivialities, ostracized from humanity.

He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.

“My thought is me: that’s why I can’t stop. I exist because I think … and I can’t stop myself from thinking. At this very moment—it’s frightful—if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: the hatred, the disgust of existing, there are as many ways to make myself exist, to thrust myself into existence. Thoughts are born at the back of me, like sudden giddiness, I feel them being born behind my head … if I yield, they’re going to come round in front of me, between my eyes— and I always yield, the thought grows and grows and there it is, immense, filling me completely and renewing my existence.”

-Jean Paul Sartre

If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.