If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.
Jean-Paul SartreRead
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.
Interpretation
This quote explores the idea of embracing humanity and accepting our flaws, rather than relying on unattainable ideals.
In this quote, Jean-Paul Sartre suggests that by dismissing the notion of unattainable salvation or perfection, we are left with the essence of being human. It emphasizes that every individual is made up of their own experiences and imperfections, and we are all essentially equal in our humanity. This perspective encourages acceptance of oneself and others, recognizing that no one is better than the collective experience of humanity.
In practice
This quote can be used in discussions about self-acceptance in a mental health workshop.
If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.
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.
If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.
A kiss without a moustache, they said then, is like an egg without salt; I will add to it: and it is like Good without Evil.
I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good.
Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.
Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky.
Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomized life as a voracious appetite, and the world as a place wherein ranged a multitude of appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence and disorder, a chaos of gluttony and slaughter, ruled over by chance, merciless, planless, endless.
There is no self-knowledge but an historical one. No one knows what he himself is who does not know his fellow men, especially the most prominent one of the community, the master's master, the genius of the age.
There are two levels to your pain: the pain that you create now, and the pain from the past that still lives on in your mind and body. Ceasing to create pain in the present and dissolving past pain - this is what I want to talk about now.
Understanding of the self only arises in relationship, in watching yourself in relationship to people, ideas, and things; to trees, the earth, and the world around you and within you. Relationship is the mirror in which the self is revealed. Without self-knowledge there is no basis for right thought and action.
No idea is so antiquitated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not some day be antiquitated . . . to seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.
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