Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

I pity those born of the lighter side. They have no understanding of how seductive cruelty is. The music made out of screams and pleas for mercy. Mmmm. Nothing better. (Noir)

Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.

And I mean to hear ye groan like that again. And to moan and sob, even though you dinna wish to, for ye canna help it. I mean to make you sigh as though your heart would break, and scream with the wanting, and at last to cry out in my arms, and I shall know that I've served ye well.

Break their hearts my pride and hope, break their hearts and have no mercy. -Miss Havisham

If someone strikes my heart, it does not break, but it bursts, and the flame coming out of it becomes a torch on my path.

Does the human heart know chasms so abysmal?

The church may go through her dark ages, but Christ is with her in the midnight; she may pass through her fiery furnace, but Christ is in the midst of the flame with her.

I clung to that spark of hope, nurturing it into a small flame that chased some of the shadows in my heart away.

In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.

How feeble is all language to describe the horrors we inflict upon these wretches, whom we mason up in the cells of our prisons, and condemn to perpetual solitude in the very heart of our population.

Man torturing man is a fiend beyond description. You turn a corner in the dark and there he is. You congeal into a bundle of inanimate fear. You become the very soul of anesthesia. But there is no escaping him. It is your turn now.

Somehow I enjoy watching people suffer.

You, darkness, of whom I am born- I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes the rest.

I don't belong. Not here. Not now. I have to get back there. The bet was rigged, he made me believe. Now there's darkness in my soul. I want to die . . . again. But I choose to come back, why?

There were two Avoxes with me in prison. Darius and Lavinia, but the guards mostly called them the redheads. They'd been our servants in the Training Center, so they arrested them, too. I watched them being tortured to death. She was lucky. They used too much voltage and her heart stopped right off. It took days to finish him off. Beating, cutting off parts. They kept asking him questions, but he couldn't speak, he just made these horrible animals sounds. They didn't want information, you know? They wanted me to see it.

Is it any wonder the power this man held over me - this man who did not run from his demons like most of us do, but embraced them as his own, clutching them to his heart in a choke-hold grip. He did not try to escape them by denying them or drugging them or bargaining with them. He met them where they lived, in the secret place most of us keep hidden. Warthrop was Warthrop down to the marrow of his bones, for his demons defined him; they breathed the breath of life into him; and without them, he would go down, as most of us do, into the purgatorial fog of a life unrealized.

Most things are born in the mothering darkness and most things die. Darkness is the womb of creation, my boy. But the sun with his seven horns of flame is the father of life.

You slammed my face down on the barbecue grill, now my scars are all healing, but my heart never will.

There are souls beneath that water. Fixed in slimethey speak their piece, end it, and start again:'Sullen were we in the air made sweet by the Sun;in the glory of his shining our hearts poureda bitter smoke. Sullen were we begun;sullen we lie forever in this ditch.'This litany they gargle in their throatsas if they sand, but lacked the words and pitch.

Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark rooftops. The wind came down from the north like a runner in lacrosse, violent and hard, to batter every living thing. They were there, each one alone in conversation with the stars, mining ephemeral love from cold and distant light.

Ah, but depression - that is what we all hate. We the afflicted. Whereas the relatives and shrinks, the tribal ring, they rather welcome it: you are quiet and you suffer.

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.

The coward does not know what it means to be alone: an enemy is always standing behind his chair.

Bright beads of red are rising through the ink, Hearts-blood bubbles smearing out into the black stream