Jean Paul Quotes

Photographs are not ideas. They give us ideas.

The coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic.

Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.

Something begins in order to end: an adventure doesn't let itself be extended it achieves significance only through its death.

As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished.

One does not adopt a new idea, one slips into it.

I wanted my own words. But the ones I use have dragged through I don't know how many consciences.

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.

Perhaps its inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is.

To think new thoughts you have to break the bones in your head

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

The characteristic of every neurosis is to represent itself as natural.

A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.

Some of these days, Oh, you'll miss me honey

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.

Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.

A human being who wakened in the morning with a queesy stomach, with fifteen hours to kill before next bedtime, had not much use for freedom.

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

Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.

Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total... because it may well involve the whole world.

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

Variety of mere nothings gives more pleasure than uniformity of something.

Beauty attracts us men; but if, like an armed magnet it is pointed, beside, with gold and silver, it attracts with tenfold power.

I love Madonna. She is the only woman I have asked to marry me. She refused, of course.

Always my collections are made of different influences.

The viable jewels of life remain untouched when man forgets his vocation of searching for the truth of his existence.

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

It is disgusting -- Why must we have bodies?

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

The consciousness that says 'I am' is not the consciousness that thinks.

What is not possible is not to choose.

When one does nothing, one believes oneself responsible for everything.

One should commit no stupidity twice, the variety of choice is, in the end, large enough.

So much torture, bloodshed, deceit. You cannot make your young people practice torture twenty-four hours a day and not expect to pay a price for it.

The universe remains dark. We are animals struck by catastrophe.

Everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident

Is there really nothing, nothing left of me?

I needed to justify my existence, and I had made an absolute of literature. It took me thirty years to get rid of this state of mind.

The more absurd life is, the more insupportable death is.

For the time being I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of all flabby masses which move spontaneously.

That is exactly the writer's problem. What does literature stand for in a hungry world?

I am responsible for everything... except my very responsibility.

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

It is better; heavier, crueler. The mouth you wear for hell.

So long as one believes in God, one has the right to do the Good in order to be moral.

It is enough that one man hate another for hate to gain, little by little, all mankind.

Criticism often takes from the tree caterpillars and blossoms together.

Existence precedes and rules essence.