Jean Paul Quotes

What I lacked [in La Nausee] was a sense of reality. I have changed since. I have slowly learned to experience reality.

Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up; I forget them almost immediately.

My pessimism has never been flabby.

Little flashes of sun on the surface of a cold, dark sea.

With a little luck that epoch may arrive. I am on the side of those who think that things will go better when the world has changed.

The form [of literature] matters little to me, classical or not.

I should wish [Alain Robbe-Grillet] to realize that Guinea exists.

I think [Alain Robbe-Grillet] a good writer, but he speaks to the comfortable bourgeoisie.

[Contemporary writer] could be a kind of [Samuel] Beckett who would not be felt to be totally committed to despair.

This [service to oppressed] is the writer's task, and, if he fulfills it as he should, he acquires no merit from it.

Life has no meaning, the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. Italways made me want to do just the opposite.

Il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action.(There is no reality except in action.)

Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.

All men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

You haven't learned anything until you learn to learn everything.

Death is a continuation of my life without me...

At an age when most children are playing hopscotch or with their dolls, you, poor child, who had no friends or toys, you toyed with dreams of murder, because that is a game to play alone.

Hell is—other people!

People. You must love people. Men are admirable. I wantto vomit—and suddenly, there it is: the Nausea

When the rich wage war it's the poor who die.

Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.

Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.

There are two ways to go to the gas chamber, free and not free.

People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing.

She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.

Still, somewhere in the depths of ourselves we all harbor an ashamed, unsatisfied melancholy that quietly awaits a funeral.

Man is free rather than man is freedom.

But I can't see anything any more: however much I search the past I can only retrieve scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, nor whether they are remembered or invented.

If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.

Be self-indulgent, and those who are also self-indulgent will like you. Tear your neighbor to pieces, and the other neighbors will laugh. But if you beat your soul, all souls will cry out.

Much more likely you’ll hurt me. Still what does it matter? If I’ve got to suffer, it may as well be at your hands, your pretty hands.

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

You're lucky. I'm always conscious of myself —in my mind. Painfully conscious.

Commitment is an act, not a word

My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.

Only he who knows how to speak can be silent.

Man is fully responsible for his nature, choices and lifestyle.

This instant which I cannot leave, which locks me in and limits me on every side, this instant I am made of will be no more than a confused dream.

After all, she is lucky. I have been much too calm these past three years. I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity. I leave.

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

The most clear-sided view of the darkest possible situation is itself an act of optimism

The writer has to die to give birth to the intellectual in the service of the wretched of the earth.

Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it any more. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.

So you realized that there were always women in tears, or a red-headed man, or something else to spoil your effects?""Yes, naturally.

The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.

A little more and I would have fallen into the mirror trap. I avoided it, but only to fall into the window trap: with nothing to do, my arms dangling, I go over to the window.

Existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him.

[E]very man ought to say to himself, "Am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?