Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes on Time
Sartre's analysis of temporality in Being and Nothingness (1943) Part Two, Chapter Two, develops one of the most sustained existentialist treatments of the topic. Temporality is not a feature of the for-itself in addition to its other features but the structural mode of being of the for-itself itself: the for-itself is its past in the mode of having-to-be (the burdened weight of the facticity it cannot escape), is its future in the mode of being-toward (the projects through which it transcends its situation), and is its present as the perpetual decompression by which the past is held away from the future. The framework draws on Husserl and Heidegger but develops the analysis in characteristically Sartrean directions through the concrete phenomenological descriptions for which Being and Nothingness is best known.
Quotes
-
“Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”
Nausea, 1938 -
“L'âge de raison ( The Age of Reason ) (1945)”
He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being. -
“L'âge de raison ( The Age of Reason ) (1945)”
He yawned. He had finished the day and he had also finished with his youth. Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism , smiling tolerance , resignation , common sense stoicism - all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life. -
“Every age has its own poetry ; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.”
Orphée Noir (Black Orpheus) -
“I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.”
Nausea(1938) | Diary entry of Friday (2 February), concerning a card game -
“The French bourgeois doesn't dislike shit, provided it is served up to him at the right time.”
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr(1952) | Book 2, "To Succeed in Being All, Strive to be Nothing in Anything" -
“I wanted for the moments in my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. It would be just as well to try to catch time by the tail.”
Nausea(1938)