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Description
The first novel of Sartre's insignificant Roads to Freedom series, The Age of Reason is set in 1938 and tells of Mathieu, a French professor of philosophy who is obsessed with the idea of freedom. As the shadows of the Second World War draw closer -- even as his personal life is complicated by... read more
Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis
Memorable Quotes
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“If I didn't try to assume responsibility for my own existence, it would seem utterly absurd to go existing.”
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“It doesn't matter if a man is badly dressed when he doesn't bother about his clothes at all. What is rotten is to make a splash and not pull it off.”
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“Pictures have no positive force, they are no more than suggestions; indeed, their existence depends on me, I am free as I confront them.”
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“I should myself have thought that freedom consisted in frankly confronting situations into which one has deliberately entered, and accepting all one's responsibilities. But that, no doubt, is not your view: you condemn capitalist society, and yet you are an official in that society; you display an abstract sympathy with Communists, but you take care not to commit yourself, you have never voted. You despised the bourgeois class, and yet you are a bourgeois, son and brother of a bourgeois, and you live like a bourgeois. You have, however, reached the age of reason, my poor Mathieu. But you try to dodge that fact to, you try to pretend you're younger than you are. Well - perhaps I'm doing you an injustice. Perhaps you haven't in fact reached the age of reason, it's really a moral age - perhaps I've got there sooner than you have.”
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“It is all very well to play for a while with fools - slacken the cord and they rise into the air, vast and imponderable, like balloons; pull the cord, and down they drop to the level of the earth, where they gyrate distractedly, or bounce about in response to every jerk of the string; but fools must be changed fairly often or the entertainment becomes tiresome.”
Kind of like this book! -
“The individual's duty is to do what he wants to do, to think whatever he likes, to be accountable to no one but himself, to challenge every idea and every person.”
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“Whatever happens, it is by his agency that everything must happen. Even if he let himself be carried off, in helplessness and in despair, even if he let himself be carried off like an old sack of coal, he would have chosen his own damnation: 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 dead weight about with him for years to come.”
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“You renounced everything in order to be free. Take one step further, renounce your own freedom: join the Communist party and everything shall be rendered unto you.”
Now we see why the book is so messed up!
First Sentence
Save yourself! Quick, close the book and never open it again!!!!!
Table of Contents
Authors & Contributors
- Jean-Paul Sartre (Author)
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