Jean Paul Quotes

I entered the Communist Party because its cause was just and I will leave it when it ceases to be just.

What never vary are the necessities of being in the world, of having to labor and to die there.

I have changed as everyone changes: within a permanency.

Man's existence precedes his essence

From the period when I wrote La Nausea I wanted to create a morality. My evolution consists in my no longer dreaming of doing so.

I have always been an optimist, perhaps even too much.

[Andre] Gide can say it to me: it is a writer's morality only addressed to a few privileged people. For that reason it no longer interests me.

As long as the writer cannot write for the two billion men who are hungry, he will be oppressed by a feeling of malaise.

We do not wish to say only that a man is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for that of all men.

For forty years I was conscripted by the absolute, the neurosis. The absolute is gone. There remain countless tasks among which literature is in no way privileged.

In Guinea I could read [Franz] Kafka. I re-discover in him my own discomfort.

I admire [Samuel] Beckett, but I am totally against him. He seeks no improvement.

[Stéphane Mallarmé] theory of the hermetic is a mistake, but he can be only difficult to read when he has difficult things to say.

That of War and Peace or of Almagestes. All are satisfactory. The only criterion of a work is its validity: that it should grip and that it should last.

I am not asking for sensational revelations, but I would like to sense the meaning of that minute, to feel it's urgency.

You see, I'm fond of teasing, it's a second nature with me—and I'm used to teasing myself. Plaguing myself, if you prefer; I don't tease nicely.

It's just what people do when they're getting old, when they're sick of themselves and their life; they think of money and take care of themselves.

Existence is prior to essence.

I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.

A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.

Do you think I can read [Alain] Robbe-Grillet in an underdeveloped country? He does not feel himself maimed.

All-powerful god, who am I but the fear that I inspire in others?

The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure nihilation of the In-itself; it is like a hole of being at the heart of Being.

You see, the contemporary writer must write through his intimations of unease, while trying to elucidate them.

I have always been happy. Even if I had been more honest with regard to myself at that moment I should still have written La Nausee.

Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them... there is nothing.

In a country lacking leaders, in Africa, for instance, how could a native educated in Europe refuse to become a professor, even at the price of his literary vocation?

In Les Mots I explain the origin of my madness, of my neurosis. This analysis may help the young who dream of writing.

To love is never just to love since it is also to will to love, and ... to love in spite of oneself, to allow oneself to be overcome by one's love.

My eyes feel all soft, all soft as flesh. I'm going to sleep.

Remember, Orestes: you were part of my herd, you grazed in the fields along with my sheep. Your liberty is nothing but a mange eating away at you, it is nothing but an exile.

Heroism is not to be won at the point of a pen.

The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free, Aegistheus. You know it and they do not.

I consider Les Nourritures Terrestres as a frightening book: "Look for God in no other place than everywhere." Go and tell that to a workman, an engineer!

Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom-ah the soul-destroying boredom-of long days of mild content.

Ah! How I hate the crimes of the new generation: they are dry and sterile as darnel.

The status of 'native' is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent.

Criminals together. We're in hell, my little friend, and there's never any mistake there. People are not damned for nothing.

The appearance of the other in the world corresponds therefore to a congealed sliding of the whole universe.

Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.

The past is the luxury of proprietors.

A good hanging now and then -- that entertains folk in the provinces and robs death of its glamour.

Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the gods can do nothing against that man.

Everything in my past, in my training, everything that has been most essential in my activity up to now has made me above all a man who writes, and it is too late for that to change.

I know only one Church: it is the society of men.

I receive letters from workers, from secretaries. . . . They are the most interesting ones.

I don't know. Everything. Living. Smoking.

At that time [1954], as a result of political events, I was deeply preoccupied by my relations with the Communist Party.

The recent experiences of pocketbooks prove this. I have changed my public since my works have been published in a smaller format.

Besides one should not believe that the people only want reading that is easy to absorb.