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Existentialism is a Humanism

by Jean-Paul Sartre

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Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from Existentialism is a Humanism:

“Il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action.(There is no reality except in action.)”
“In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.”
“In choosing myself, I choose man.”
“The existentialist cannot accept that man can be helped by any sign on earth, for he will interpret the sign as he chooses.”
“a man is more of a man because of what he does not say than what he does say.”
“For many have but one resource to sustain them in their misery, and that is to think, “Circumstances have been against me, I was worthy to be something much better than I have been. I admit I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not the leisure to do so; or, if I have had no children to whom I could devote myself it is because I did not find the man I could have lived with. So there remains within me a wide range of abilities, inclinations and potentialities, unused but perfectly viable, which endow me with a worthiness that could never be inferred from the mere history of my actions.” But in reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art.”
“What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.”
“What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterward.”
“There is no reality except in action. Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life.”
“The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse.”
“Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of and the value of it is nothing else but the sense that you choose.”
“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.”
“القيم الأخلاقية غامضة غير محددة، وهى تمتد إلى ما لا نهاية.”
“Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man....”
“Il n’y a de réalité que dans l’action… [L’être humain] n’existe que dans la mesure où il se réalise, il n’est donc rien d’autre que sa vie”
“No doctrine is more optimistic [than existentialism], since it declares that man's destiny lies within himself.”
“إن الإنسان محكوم عليه بالحرية: محكوم لأنه لم يخلق ذاته، وهو حر لأنه قد صار مسؤلاً عن كل مايفعل بمجرد أن تواجد في العالم.”
“Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.”
“The distance between the being and the conscience is the nothing”
“This is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free: condemned, because he did not create himself, yet nonetheless free, because once cast into the world, he is responsible for everything that he does.”
“Existence precedes essence”
“لا يمكن أن أدلل على حقيقة عاطفتى وكلامى إلا إذا مارست ذلك فعلاً.”
“Celebrity, for me, equal hatred”
“أستطيع أن أقيس قوة عاطفتى لو أتيت من الأعمال ما يؤكدها ويصادق عليها.”
“If God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimise our behaviour.”
“Everything happens to every man as if the entire human race were staring at him and measuring itself by what he does. So every man ought to be asking himself, "Am I really a man who is entitled to act in such a way that the entire human race should be measuring itself by my actions?" And if he does not ask himself that, he masks his anguish.”
“L'existentialiste, au contraire, pense qu'il est très gênant que Dieu n'existe pas, car avec lui disparaît toute possibilité de trouver des valeurs dans un ciel intelligible; il ne peut plus y avoir de bien a priori, puisqu'il n'y a pas de conscience infinie et parfaite pour le penser; il n'est écrit nulle part que le bien existe, qu'il faut être honnête, qu'il ne faut pas mentir, puisque précisément nous sommes sur un plan où il y a seulement des hommes.”
“sólo el perro o el caballo podrían emitir un juicio de conjunto sobre el hombre y declarar que el hombre es asombroso, lo que ellos no se preocupan de hacer, por lo menos que yo sepa. Pero no se puede admitir que un hombre pueda formular un juicio sobre el hombre.”
“Those who conceal from themselves this total freedom, under the guise of solemnity, or by making deterministic excuses, I will call cowards. Others, who try to prove their existence is necessary, when man's appearance on earth is merely contingent, I will call bastards.”
“The word “subjectivism” is to be understood in two senses, and our adversaries play upon only one of them. Subjectivism means, on the one hand, the freedom of the individual subject and, on the other, that man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity. It is the latter which is the deeper meaning of existentialism. When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. To choose between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen; for we are unable ever to choose the worse. What we choose is always the better; and nothing can be better for us unless it is better for all. If, moreover, existence precedes essence and we will to exist at the same time as we fashion our image, that image is valid for all and for the entire epoch in which we find ourselves. Our responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole.”

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