Jean-Paul Sartre - Nausea (1938)

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He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.

Jean-Paul Sartre
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them... there is nothing.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I grasp at each second, trying to suck it dry: nothing happens which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever in myself, nothing, neither the fugitive tenderness of those lovely eyes, nor the noises of the street, nor the false dawn of early morning: and even so the minute passes and I do not hold it back, I like to see it pass.

Jean-Paul Sartre
As for the square at Meknes, where I used to go every day, it's even simpler: I do not see it at all anymore. All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words that are indivisibly bound together: a charming square at Meknes. … I don't see anything any more: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Monsieur … I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.

Jean-Paul Sartre
When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell a story: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow by too: you suddenly see people appear who speak and then go away; you plunge into stories of which you can't make head or tail: you'd make a terrible witness.

Jean-Paul Sartre
The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.

Jean-Paul Sartre
For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

Jean-Paul Sartre
How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?

Jean-Paul Sartre
I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it. I know I'll never jump again.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?

Jean-Paul Sartre
I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.

Jean-Paul Sartre
And we feel that the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations, promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to all that did not herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the man was walking in the night without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of dull rich prizes, and he did not make his choice.

Jean-Paul Sartre
For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, just notes, a myriad of tiny tremors. The notes know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them then destroys them, without ever leaving them the chance to recuperate and exist for themselves.... I would like to hold them back, but I know that, if I succeeded in stopping one, there would only remain in my hand a corrupt and languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even want that death: I know of few more bitter or intense impressions.

Jean-Paul Sartre
My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think … and I can't prevent myself from thinking.

Jean-Paul Sartre
As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Everything is gratuitous, this garden, this city and myself. When you suddenly realize it, it makes you feel sick and everything begins to drift... that's nausea.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound and secret delirium of nature — could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it.

Jean-Paul Sartre
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?

Jean-Paul Sartre
I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I wanted for the moments in my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. It would be just as well to try to catch time by the tail.

Jean-Paul Sartre