Atheists From France

"Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire."

"He marveled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so alert to what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all. He was being judged by what he had been. Just as dogs don't change character, men are dogs to one another."

"Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory...Everything is forgotten, even great love."

"To have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre."

"It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about."

"It's better to bet on this life than on the next."

"Avoir de l'argent c'est se libérer de l'argent."

"Seulement, il faut du temps pour être heureux. Beaucoup de temps. Le bonheur lui aussi est une longue patience."

"The direction of the world overwhelms me at this time. In the long run, all the continents (yellow, black and brown) will spill over onto Old Europe. They are hundreds and hundreds of millions. They are hungry and they are not afraid to die. We no longer know how to die or how to kill. We could preach, but Europe believes in nothing. So, we must wait for the year 1000 or a miracle. For my part, I find it harder and harder to live before a wall."

"If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."

"Ce que, finalement, je sais de plus sûr sur la morale et les obligations des hommes, c'est au football que je le dois."

"Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower."

"Life continues, and some mornings, weary of the noise, discouraged by the prospect of the interminable work to keep after, sickened also by the madness of the world that leaps at you from the newspaper, finally convinced that I will not be equal to it and that I will disappoint everyone—all I want to do is sit down and wait for evening. This is what I feel like, and sometimes I yield to it."

"Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this helps us to die."

"Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful."

"There is not love of life without despair about life."

"A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object."

"With rebellion, awareness is born."

"Hungary conquered and in chains has done more for freedom and justice than any people for twenty years. But for this lesson to get through and convince those in the West who shut their eyes and ears, it was necessary, and it can be no comfort to us, for the people of Hungary to shed so much blood which is already drying in our memories. In Europe's isolation today, we have only one way of being true to Hungary, and that is never to betray, among ourselves and everywhere, what the Hungarian heroes died for, never to condone, among ourselves and everywhere, even indirectly, those who killed them. It would indeed be difficult for us to be worthy of such sacrifices."

"O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer."

"One does not decide the truth of a thought according to whether it is right-wing or left-wing."

"Simone Weil, je le sais encore maintenant, est le seul grand esprit de notre temps et je souhaite que ceux qui le reconnaissent en reçoivent assez de modestie pour ne pas essayer d'annexer ce témoignage bouleversant. Pour moi, je serais comblé si l'on pouvait dire qu'à ma place, et avec les faibles moyens dont je dispose, j'ai servi à faire connaître et à répandre son oeuvre dont on n'a pas encore mesuré tout le retentissement."

"Toute idée fausse finit dans le sang, mais il s'agit toujours du sang des autres. C'est ce qui explique que certains de nos philosophes se sentent à l'aise pour dire n'importe quoi."

"Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard. It steels itself to attain the absolute and authority; it wants to transfigure the world before having exhausted it, to set it to rights before having understood it. Whatever it may say, our era is deserting this world."

"We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink."

"We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her."

"Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this?"

"It is the failing of a certain literature to believe that life is tragic because it is wretched. Life can be magnificent and overwhelming — that is its whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would be almost easy to live. And M. Sartre's hero does not perhaps give us the real meaning of his anguish when he insists on those aspects of man he finds repugnant, instead of basing his reasons for despair on certain of man's signs of greatness. The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it."

"A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images. And in a good novel, the whole of the philosophy has passed into the images. But if once the philosophy overflows the characters and action, and therefore looks like a label stuck on the work, the plot loses its authenticity and the novel its life. Nevertheless, a work that is to last cannot dispense with profound ideas. And this secret fusion between experiences and ideas, between life and reflection on the meaning of life, is what makes the great novelist."

"Nous nous trompons toujours deux fois sur ceux que nous aimons: d'abord à leur avantage, puis à leur désavantage."

"Fate is not in man but around him."

"And when we speak of "abandonment" - a favorite word of Heidegger - we only mean to say that God does not exist and that it is necessary to draw the consequences of his absence to the end."

"Sartre, indeed, blames Christians for the origin of anti-Semitism because they talk of the Jews as the murderers of Jesus. (Yet he destroys the point that he had made by saying in a footnote that Jesus was really killed by the Roman soldiers as an agitator, for, in Sartre's terms, if it could be proved historically that the Jews not the Romans were the actual murderers of Jesus, then anti-Semitism by Christians might be justified.) In his anti-Christianity, Sartre himself appears as the frustrated anti-Semite and treats Christians in accordance with his idea of Christians in general, and not as they are."

"I could see clearly that this problem could only be solved on the individual and personal level; political revolt is irrelevant. Both Camus and Sartre had been neatly hog-tied by their earlier radicalism. Camus came to see that rebellion is a political roundabout that revolves back to the same old tyranny; too ashamed to admit that he had outgrown his leftism, he found himself in an intellectual cul-de-sac. Sartre accused Camus of being a reactionary; but he paid for his own refusal to reexamine his political convictions by congealing into a grotesque attitude of permanent indignation, shaking his fist at some abstract Authority. Where politics is concerned, he seemed determined to be guided by his emotions."

"Marcuse’s forte was as a philosopher. His preoccupation with epistemology and dialectics was typical of a growing trend among Marxist writers seeking to challenge the Marxism that had been customary since 1917. Jean-Paul Sartre, whose early philosophical work was constructed on the basis of ideas drawn from Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, published his Critique of Dialectical Reason in 1964. This was an attempt to bring together Marxism and the existentialist school in philosophy, and – unlike any previous Marxist thinker – Sartre argued for the crucial importance of the ‘autonomous’ and ‘self-conscious’ individual in explaining and justifying social activity. Lucio Colletti in Italy went back to Marx and suggested that Immanuel Kant rather than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had exercised the deepest influence on his thought. Colletti’s work was admired by the French communist writer Louis Althusser. But Althusser placed his emphasis elsewhere, acknowledging that some bits of Marx’s work contradicted others. This was an extraordinary admission for a Marxist to make at that time. Althusser claimed that Marxism’s claim to analytical superiority lay in the scientific method and content of Marx’s later writings; he argued that the early corpus lacked the same rigour. Marcuse, Sartre, Colletti and Althusser were style-maestros of turgidity and never tried to rise to the flights of Marx and Engels in their inspired moments. Not one of them would choose a monosyllable if a longer word could be discovered or devised. Their Marxism, if not exactly pessimistic, was cramped and cautious. What is more, they were philosophers writing mainly for other philosophers. Only Marcuse became a genuine favourite of the thousands of students who rebelled in 1968 against ‘bourgeois society’ and university discipline, as well as the American war in Vietnam."

"The nature of Sartre and Beauvoir's partnership was never a secret to their friends, and it was not a secret to the public, either, after they were abruptly launched into celebrity, in 1945. They were famous as a couple with independent lives, who met in cafés, where they wrote their books and saw their friends at separate tables, and were free to enjoy other relationships, but who maintained a kind of soul marriage. Their liaison was part of the mystique of existentialism, and it was extensively documented and coolly defended in Beauvoir's four volumes of memoirs, all of them extremely popular in France: "Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter" (1958), "The Prime of Life" (1960), "Force of Circumstance" (1963), and "All Said and Done" (1972). Beauvoir and Sartre had no interest in varnishing the facts out of respect for bourgeois notions of decency. Disrespect for bourgeois notions of decency was precisely the point."

"I like [his plays] better than his novels. I am not quite sure how I feel about Jean-Paul Sartre - He has something. But not perhaps enough. ??? WHO HAS? I never get with him that knock on the heart which means That is truth, that is final. That came from au delà. I expect one only gets that from the greatest."

"I also have a great intellectual respect for those who followed him (Husserl), Heidegger in particular, and among my countrymen, men like Paul Ricoeur (who, however, I am still far from trusting), and Mircea Eliade (a great explorer but one who does not want to be a guide, thank goodness. I have none for Jean-Paul Sartre, who seems to me too artful, and who besides (and here he pleases me) would be quite sorry to find himself respected. (Yet I like to imagine him elected to the Academie Fancaise, an honor which he certainly deserves.) But he has offered a testimony we would be quite wrong to neglect."

"The Frenchman Jean-Paul ... Sartre I remember now was — his last name had a dialectical — mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan."

"I did read some Sartre. I probably was in the generation that would have read Sartre anyway. I saw one of his plays, Huis Clos, a good play. He was fashionable, and much talked about in the fifties in America. It was his high days. I realized gradually that I found him in too many ways detestable-the incredible negativity of some of his work... Of course he is out to shock and so on, but I was a very serious twenty-year-old, so I went into rebelling against Sartre, and others of that kind, so that's why I think I was making jokes about him, later on."

"One of the causes of the popularity of Marxism among educated people was the fact that in its simple form it was very easy; even Sartre noticed that Marxists are lazy. Indeed, they enjoyed having one key to open all doors, one universally applicable explanation for everything, an instrument that makes it possible to master all of history and economics without actually having to study either."

"Jean-Paul Sartre called fossil fuels "capital bequeathed to mankind by other living beings"; they are quite literally the decayed remnants of long-dead life-forms. It's not that these substances are evil; it's just that they belong where they are: in the ground, where they are performing valuable ecological functions."

"I don't think that Sartre's worst shortcoming was his failure to see straight in World War II. However, I do think that his political myopia during the occupation years should be understood in the light of his completely apolitical worldview hitherto. This is a man, after all, who managed to live through the 1930s with no apparent political engagement or response of any kind, notwithstanding a year spent in Germany and the remarkable upheaval of the Popular Front in France. There can be no doubt that, in retrospect, Sartre—like many of his friends—felt uneasy about all this. Some of his later moral writings, on the subject of good faith, bad faith, responsibility and the like, are perhaps best understood as retroactive projections of his own bad conscience. However, what has always troubled me about Sartre was his continuing failure to think straight, long after the ambiguities of the 1930s and 1940s had dissipated. Why, after all, did he so insistently refuse to discuss the crimes of communism, even to the extent of remaining conspicuously silent about anti-Semitism in Stalin's last years? The answer, of course, is that he made a deliberate decision not to think of those crimes in ethical terms, or at least in a language which would engage his own ethical commitment. In short, he found ways to avoid a difficult choice—while insistently claiming that avoiding hard choices was precisely the exercise of bad faith which he so famously defined and condemned. It was this unforgivable confusion—or, more bluntly, dissemblance—that I find unacceptable in precisely Sartre's own terms. It is not as though his generation was unusually confused or mystified: Jean-Paul Sartre was born within a year of not just Hannah Arendt but also Arthur Koestler and Raymond Aron. That generation, born around 1905, was without question the most influential intellectual cohort of the century. They reached maturity just as Hitler was coming to power and were drawn willy-nilly into the historical vortex, confronting all the tragic choices of the age with little option but to take sides or have their side chosen for them. After the war, young enough in most cases to avoid the discredit that fell upon their seniors, they exercised precocious intellectual and literary influence, dominating the European (and American) scene for decades to come."

"As a rule, philosophers found Sartre slippery; playwrights thought him didactic. But each supposed him a genius at the other activity."

"The impression I came away with was one of overwhelming nostalgia. Sartre was the Last Intellectual. True, France still has writers on philosophical questions who also march in demonstrations. (One of them, Luc Ferry, has even been made the nation's minister for education.) But there will never again be a combination of totalizing theoretician, literary colossus, and political engagé like Sartre. Today's French intellectuals look like puny technocrats by comparison. Luckily, they proved to be on the winning side of history, so they can afford to be gracious to him, to say, along with de Gaulle, Sartre, c'est aussi la France."

"are we willing to accept Jean-Paul Sartre's definition of Judaism, "anti-semitism makes Jews" (that is, he even denies us the right of self-definition)? Or are there also things about us that have nothing whatsoever to do with the acts and attitudes of others?"

"According to Jean-Paul Sarte, "hell is other people," but I'm not sure that Sarte wanted to spend the whole of eternity by himself."

"The Critique de la raison dialectique is a nineteenth-century man's magnificent and pathetic attempt to think the twentieth century. In that sense, Sartre is the last Hegelian and, I would even say, the last Marxist."

"What is it about the study of philosophy that tends to make brilliant minds stupid when it comes down to what are known as actual cases? Consider Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the four great names in twentieth-century philosophy: the first was a Nazi, the second died certain that America was responsible for all the world's evil, the third was a Stalinist long after any justification for being so could be adduced, and the fourth lived on the borders of madness most of his life. Contemplation of the lives of philosophers is enough to drive one to the study of sociology."

"Jean Paul Sartre has said that all of French Existentialism is to be found in Ivan Karamazov's contention that if there is no God, everything is permitted."