“Starting from where you are now, you choose. And in choosing, you also choose who you will be. If this sounds difficult and unnerving, it's because it is. Sartre does not deny that the need to keep making decisions brings… — Sarah Bakewell Copy Share Image
“I do not portray being,” he wrote, “I portray passing. Not the passing from one age to another … but from day to day, from minute… — Sarah Bakewell Copy Share
“to see the world exactly as you did half an hour ago is impossible, just as it is impossible to see it from the… — Sarah Bakewell Copy Share
“As the modern critic David Quint has summed it up, Montaigne would probably interpret the message for humanity in Christ’s crucifixion as being “Don’t… — Sarah Bakewell Copy Share
“He blushed to see other Frenchmen overcome with joy whenever they met a compatriot abroad. The would fall on each other, cluster in a… — Sarah Bakewell Copy Share
“He distinguishes between the German word Seiende, which can refer to any individual entity, such as a mouse or a church door, and Sein,… — Sarah Bakewell Copy Share
“Starting from where you are now, you choose. And in choosing, you also choose who you will be. If this sounds difficult and unnerving,… — Sarah Bakewell Copy Share
“Instead, this cup of coffee is a rich aroma, at once earthy and perfumed; it is the lazy movement of a curlicue of steam… — Sarah Bakewell Copy Share
“As history has repeatedly suggested, nothing is more effective for demolishing traditional legal protections than the combined claims that a crime is uniquely dangerous,… — Sarah Bakewell Copy Share
“The Childhood of a Leader’, written in 1938, Sartre examined a character, Lucien, who shores up an identity for himself as an anti-Semite mainly… — Sarah Bakewell Copy Share
“Over the centuries, this interpretation and reinterpretation creates a long chain connecting a writer to all future readers- who frequently read each other as… — Sarah Bakewell Copy Share
“Be free from vanity and pride. Be free from belief, disbelief, convictions, and parties. Be free from habit. Be free from ambition and greed.… — Sarah Bakewell Copy Share
“If you fail to grasp life, it will elude you. If you do grasp it, it will elude you anyway.” — Sarah Bakewell Copy Share
“Montaigne’s half-century was so disastrous for France that it took another half-century to recover from it—and in some ways recovery never came, for the… — Sarah Bakewell Copy Share
“Reading Plutarch, he lost awareness of the gap in time that divided them—much bigger than the gap between Montaigne and us. It does not… — Sarah Bakewell Copy Share
