Life & Wisdom Quote by Tahar Ben Jelloun

It is a deliciously barbed compliment: the kind that lets you keep the aura of intellectual seriousness while quietly refusing the aesthetic toll it demands. Tahar Ben Jelloun splits Sartre in two - the thinker worth engaging, the stylist not worth enduring - and in doing so, he draws a line between philosophy as moral posture and literature as lived pleasure.

The intent isn’t to dunk on Sartre so much as to defend a poet’s standard of readability. Sartre’s ideas (freedom, responsibility, bad faith) travel well; they can be lifted out of the dense, sometimes hectoring prose and used as tools. But Sartre the writer often performs the very anxiety he diagnoses: sentences that feel like arguments marching in boots, novels that can read like case studies, a tone that insists on its own importance. Ben Jelloun’s aside exposes a quiet truth about canon-making: we’re trained to equate difficulty with depth, and to treat boredom as the admission price of seriousness.

The subtext is also political and generational. Ben Jelloun, a Francophone Moroccan poet whose work navigates colonial afterlives and identity’s rough edges, is speaking from a literature shaped by lyric compression and narrative urgency. Sartre’s “views” were famously anti-colonial in later years, a point of solidarity; his “writing” belongs to a French metropolitan tradition that can feel sealed off, even when it claims to speak for liberation.

The line lands because it’s a tiny act of emancipation: permission to admire the ethics without fetishizing the style, and to demand that ideas earn their keep on the page.