mertbozkurt/quotes_philosophers huggingface dataset:
Man is abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no aim but what he sets himself.
Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.
I discovered suddenly that alienation, exploitation of man by man, under-nourishment, relegated to the background metaphysical evil which is a luxury.
Nicias, do you think you can erase with good deeds the wrongs you committed against your mother? What good deed will ever reach her? Her soul is a scorching noon time, without a single breath of a breeze, nothing moves, nothing changes, nothing lives there; a great emaciated sun, an immobile sun eternally consumes her.
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.
To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being
There is a universe behind and before him. And the day is approaching when closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left; he will say to himself, "now what?
Perhaps its inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is.
I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.
Like morality, literature needs to be universal. So that the writer must put himself on the side of the majority, of the two billion starving, if he wishes to be able to speak to all and be read by all. Failing that, he is at the service of a privileged class and, like it, an exploiter.
We will freedom for freedom�s sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.
Philosophy appears to some people as a homogenous milieu: there thoughts are born and die, there systems are built, and there, in turn, they collapse. Others take Philosophy for a specific attitude which we can freely adopt at will. Still others see it as a determined segment of culture. In our view Philosophy does not exist.
You know how much I admire Che Guevara. In fact, I believe that the man was not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age: as a fighter and as a man, as a
theoretician who was able to further the cause of revolution by drawing his theories from his personal experience in battle.
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.
I exist. It's sweet, so sweet, so slow. And light: you'd think it floated all by itself. It stirs. It brushes by me, melts and vanishes. Gently, gently. There is bubbling water in my mouth. I swallow. It slides down my throat, it caresses me � and now it comes up again into my mouth. For ever I shall have a little pool of whitish water in my mouth - lying low - grazing my tongue. And this pool is still me. And the tongue. And the throat is me.
If I relegate impossible Salvation to the prop room, what remains? A whole man, composed of all men and as good as all of them and no better than any.
I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me, and I have followed the source of rivers towards their source or plunged into forests, always making for other cities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; and I could never turn back any more than a record can spin in reverse. And all that was leading me where ? To this very moment.
Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.
In order to make myself recognized by the Other, I must risk my own life. To risk one's life, in fact, is to reveal oneself as not-bound to the objective form or to any determined existence
I do not understand! I understand nothing! I cannot understand nor do I want to understand! I want to believe! To Believe!
Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of form a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all.
What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.
One could only damage oneself through the harm one did to others. One could never get directly at oneself.
My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.
A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing.
Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.
I am finishing a biography of [Gustave] Flaubert. Because he is the opposite of what I am. One needs to rub up against argument.
This is the basis for the joy of love when there is joy; we feel that our existence is justified.
What's done at night belongs to the night. In the daytime you don't talk about it.
If I did not publish this autobiography [Les Mots] sooner and in its most radical form, it is because I considered it exaggerated.
Time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.
All I want is' - and he uttered the final words through clenched teeth and with a sort of shame - 'to retain my freedom.' I should myself have thought,' said Jacques, 'that freedom consisted in frankly confronting situations into which one had deliberately entered, and accepting all one's responsibilities. But that, no doubt, is not your view.
The lad who dreams of being a boxing champion or an admiral chooses reality. If the writer chooses the imaginary, he confuses the two.
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.
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.
The sun is not ridiculous, quite the contrary. On everything I like, on the rust of the construction girders, on the rotten boards of the fence, a miserly, uncertain light falls, like the look you give, after a sleepless night, on decisions made with enthusiasm the day before, on pages you have written in one spurt without crossing out a word.
As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.
I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.
If you begin by saying, 'Thou shalt not lie,' there is no longer any possibility of political action.
If a Jew is fascinated by Christians it is not because of their virtues, which he values little, but because they represent anonymity, humanity without race.
Un homme n'est rien d'autre qu'une se rie d'entreprises. A man is no other than a series of undertakings.
L'homme est condamne a' e" tre libre. Man is condemned to be free.
Your scare me rather. My reflection in the glass never did that; of course, I knew it so well. Like something I had tamed...I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.
The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose, not his individuality, but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him.
For the time being I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of all flabby masses which move spontaneously.
A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.
I have seen children dying of hunger. Over against a dying child La Nausee cannot act as a counterweight.
On my way to the office in the morning, there are, in front of me, behind me, other men going to their jobs. I see them; if I dared, I would smile at them. I think to myself that I am a socialist, that they are the purpose of my life, of my efforts and that they do not know it yet.
She suffers as a miser. She must be miserly with her pleasures, as well. I wonder if sometimes she doesn't wish she were free of this monotonous sorrow, of these mutterings which start as soon as she stops singing, if she doesn't wish to suffer once and for all, to drown herself in despair. In any case, it would be impossible for her: she is bound.
Men equally honest, equally devoted to their fatherland, are momentarily separated by different conceptions of their duty.
Torture is senseless violence, born in fear... torture costs human lives but does not save them. We would almost be too lucky if these crimes were the work of savages: the truth is that torture makes torturers.
I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.
There is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving.
He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.
So long as one believes in God, one has the right to do the Good in order to be moral.
Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.
I maintain that inversion is the effect of neither a prenatal choice nor an endocrinal malformation nor even the passive and determined result of complexes. It is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.
Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.