jean-paul Sartrequotes

1905 - 1980

Photograph of Jean-Paul Sartre20th Century French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), was a playwright and novelist of outstanding talent, who took his philosophy to the streets stating, “Commitment is an act, not a word,” as he participated in left-wing political movements.

In his autobiography, The Words, Sartre recalls roaming the parks of Paris with his mother seeking playmates. Being small and cross-eyed, his never found acceptance. Sartre wrote poetically that in the refuge of his sixth-story apartment “where dreams dwell”, “the words” saved him.

In his day, Sartre broke societal expectations of sexual norms and the bourgeois lifestyle with his partner Simone de Beauvoir. They were interested in true authentic living. Sartre had attended the prestigious École Normale Supérieure and taught philosophy at Le Havre before being drafted into the military. Afterward, he lived as an independent writer.

His work in defense of human dignity and freedom, Being and Nothingness, was his masterpiece. It’s a tragic and hopeful book discussing the futility of human endeavor, while praising consciousness as non-matter and free of determinism.

Sartre turned down the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature in 1964 because he denounced literature as being bourgeois. His plays and novels remain an inspiration for modern literature all the same. Creator of a sort of Sartrean Socialism (Search for a Method), reveals an admiration of the Soviet Union, adherence to Marxism as the only philosophy for modernity, but the admittance that the latter died within the former’s system.

Sartre died from a lung tumor in 1980. An incredible 25,000 people came to pay their respects.

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