Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes & Sayings

To eat is to appropriate by destruction. — Jean-Paul Sartre

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life. — Jean-Paul Sartre

To choose not to choose is still to act. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Nothingness haunts Being. — Jean-Paul Sartre

From the very fact, indeed, that I am conscious of the motives which solicit my action, these motives are already transcendent objects from my consciousness, they are outside; in vain shall I seek to cling to them: I escape from them through my very existence. I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the affective and rational motives of my act: I am condemned to be free. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Certain details, somewhat curtailed, live in my memory. But I don't see anything anymore: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction. — Jean-Paul Sartre

The aim of language ... is to communicate ... to impart to others the results one has obtained ... As I talk, I reveal the situation ... I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it. — Jean-Paul Sartre

What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal ... For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man ... — Jean-Paul Sartre

He who asks a question is a fool for a minute; he who does not remains a fool forever.
When you realize that by changing your perspective, big things can be seen as little things, it becomes much harder to worry about anything. Commitment is an act, not a word. — Jean-Paul Sartre

In any case, if you ever leave me with a handsome man, do not tell me that you trust me because, let me warn you: that is not what will prevent me from deceiving you, if I want to. On the contrary. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death. — Jean-Paul Sartre

All-powerful god, who am I but the fear that I inspire in others? — Jean-Paul Sartre

There is no need for hell fire in hell. Hell is other people. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Man is what he wills himself to be. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Violence is good for those who have nothing to lose. — Jean-Paul Sartre

What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence. — Jean-Paul Sartre

She smiled and said with an ecstatic air: "It shines like a little diamond",
"What does?"
"This moment. It is round, it hangs in empty space like a little diamond; I am eternal. — Jean-Paul Sartre

A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness ... and suddenly the "I" pales, pales, and fades out. — Jean-Paul Sartre

It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Introspection is always retrospection — Jean-Paul Sartre

Life is a useless passion. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Because the Nazi venom worked its way even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest; because an all-powerful police sought to force us into silence every word became as precious as a declaration of principle; because we were persecuted, each of our gestures carried the weight of a commitment. — Jean-Paul Sartre

When the rich wage war it's the poor who die. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I am not asking for sensational revelations, but I would like to sense the meaning of that minute, to feel it's urgency ... — Jean-Paul Sartre

We will not go to Heaven,Goetz, and even if we both entered it, we would not have eyes to see each other, nor hands to touch each other. Up there, God gets all the attention ... We can only love on this earth and against God. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I know only one Church: it is the society of men. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Absurd, irreducible; nothing
not even a profound and secret delirium of nature
could explain [a tree root]. — Jean-Paul Sartre

A writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution — Jean-Paul Sartre

We are our choices. — Jean-Paul Sartre

There are two kinds of existentialist; first, those who are Christian ... and on the other hand the atheistic existentialists, among whom ... I class myself. What they have in common is that they think that existence precedes essence, or, if you prefer, that subjectivity must be the turning point. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I lean all my weight on the porcelain ledge, I draw my face closer until it touches the mirror. The eyes, nose, and mouth disappear. Nothing is left. Brown wrinkles show on each side of the feverish swelled lips, crevices, mole holes. A silky, white down covers the great slopes of the cheeks, two hairs protrude from the nostrils: it is a geological embossed map. And, in spite of everything, this lunar world is familiar to me. I cannot say I recognize the details. But the whole thing gives me an impression of something seen before which stupefies me: I slip quietly off to sleep. — Jean-Paul Sartre

My memories are like coins in the devil's purse: when you open it you find only dead leaves. — Jean-Paul Sartre

You see, I'm fond of teasing, it's
a second nature with me - and I'm used to teasing myself. Plaguing myself, if you prefer; I don't tease nicely. — Jean-Paul Sartre

We do not judge the people we love. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the of it is nothing other than the sense you choose. — Jean-Paul Sartre

What is not possible is not to choose. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Perhaps there is nothing in the world I cling to as much as this feeling of adventure; but it comes when it pleases; it is gone so quickly and how empty I am once it has left. Does it, ironically, pay me these short visits in order to show me that I have wasted my life? — Jean-Paul Sartre

It is an abstract change without object. Am I the one who has changed? ( ... ) I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place. This is what has given my life such a jerky, incoherent aspect. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It
always made me want to do just the opposite. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Celebrity, for me, equal hatred — Jean-Paul Sartre

Oppressed with countless little daily cares, he had waited ... For an act. A free, considered act; that should pledge his whole life, and stand at the beginning of a new existence. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I clung to nothing, in a way I was calm. But it was a horrible calm - because of my body; my body, I saw with its eyes, I heard with its ears, but it was no longer me; it sweated and trembled by itself and I didn't recognize it any more. — Jean-Paul Sartre

He was free, free for everything, free to act like an animal or like a machine. — Jean-Paul Sartre

At the same time, I learned that you always lose. Only the rascals think they win. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Have the courage to read this book, for in the first place it will make you ashamed, and shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary sentiment. — Jean-Paul Sartre

The more absurd life is, the more insupportable death is. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I am sure that fifteen minutes would be enough to reach supreme self-contempt. No thank you, I want none of that. — Jean-Paul Sartre

But for me there is neither Monday nor Sunday: there are days which pass in disorder, and then, sudden lightning like this one. Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I can't describe it, it's like the Nausea and yet it's just the opposite: at last an adventure happens to me and when I question myself I see that it happens that I am myself and that I am here; I am the one who splits in the night, I am as happy as the hero of a novel. — Jean-Paul Sartre

All the same, they [books] do serve some purpose. Culture doesn't save anything or anyone, it doesn't justify. But it's a product of man: he projects himself into it, he recognizes himself in it; that critical mirror alone offers him his image. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I hate victims who respect their executioners. — Jean-Paul Sartre

So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is - other people! — Jean-Paul Sartre

You have to aspire to everything to have hopes of doing something. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Genius is not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances. — Jean-Paul Sartre

What's done at night belongs to the night. In the daytime you don't talk about it. — Jean-Paul Sartre

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Much more likely you'll hurt me. Still what does it matter? If I've got to suffer, it may as well be at your hands, your pretty hands. — Jean-Paul Sartre

A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing. — Jean-Paul Sartre

The function of a writer is to call a spade a spade. If words are sick, it is up to us to cure them. Instead of that, many writers live off this sickness. In many cases modern literature is a cancer of words ... There is nothing more deplorable than the literary practice which, I believe, is called poetic prose and which consists of using words for the obscure harmonics which reosund about them and which are made up of vague meanings which are in contradiction with the clear meaning ... That is not all: we are living in an age of mystifications. Some are fundamental ones which are due to the structure of society; some are secondary. At any rate, the social order today rests upon the mystification of consciousness, as does disorder as well. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Existentialism is no mournful delectation but a humanist philosophy of action, effort, combat, and solidarity. Man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines say what this man is before he dies, or what mankind is before it has disappeared. — Jean-Paul Sartre

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us. — Jean-Paul Sartre

There's the story of a person who does this, does that, but it isn't I, I have nothing in common with him. He travels through countries I know no more about than if I had never been there. Sometimes, in my story, it happens that I pronounce these fine names you read in atlases, Aranjuez or Canterbury. New images are born in me, images such as people create from books who have never travelled. My words are dreams, that is all. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Two people can form a community by excluding a third. — Jean-Paul Sartre

When it is dark, the objects and I will come out of limbo — Jean-Paul Sartre

I murmur: "It's a seat," a little like an exorcism. But the word stays on my lips: it refuses to go and put itself on the thing. It stays what it is, with its red plush, thousands of little red paws in the air, all still, little dead paws. This enormous belly turned upward, bleeding, inflated - bloated with all its dead paws, this belly floating in this car, in this grey sky, is not a seat. It could just as well be a dead donkey tossed about in the water, floating with the current, belly in the air in a great grey river, a river of floods; and I could be sitting on the donkey's belly, my feet dangling in the clear water. — Jean-Paul Sartre

It is enough that one man hate another for hate to gain, little by little, all mankind. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Neither sad nor gay is the desert - a boundless waste of sand under a burning waste of sky. — Jean-Paul Sartre

But no: he was empty, he was confronted by a vast anger, a desperate anger, he saw it and could almost have touched it. But it was inert - if it were to live and find expression and suffer, he must lend it his own body. It was other people's anger. "Swine!" He clenched his fists, he strode along, but nothing came, the anger remained external to himself. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away. — Jean-Paul Sartre

The true sea is cold and black, full of animals... — Jean-Paul Sartre

Many young people today do not concern themselves with style. They think that what one says should be said simply and that is all. For me, style - which does not exclude simplicity, quite the opposite - is above all a way of saying three or four things in one. There is the simple sentence, with its immediate meaning, and then at the same time, below this immediate meaning, other meanings are organized. If one is not capable of giving language this plurality of meaning, then it is not worth the trouble to write. — Jean-Paul Sartre

To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe. — Jean-Paul Sartre

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. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I am myself and I am here. — Jean-Paul Sartre

The Intellectual is someone who meddles in what does not concern him. — Jean-Paul Sartre

The rain has stopped, the air is mild, the sky slowly rolls up fine black images : it is more than enough to frame the perfect moment ; to reflect these images, she would cause dark little tides to be born in our hearts. I don't know how to take advantage of the occasion : I walk at random, calm and empty, under this wasted sky. — Jean-Paul Sartre

But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Never have I thought that I was the happy possessor of a "talent;" my sole concern has been to save myself by work and faith. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think any more, I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I ... because ... ugh! — Jean-Paul Sartre

Words are loaded pistols. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I must be without remorse or regrets as I am without excuse; for from the instant of my upsurge into being, I carry the weight of the world by myself alone without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom. — Jean-Paul Sartre

It isn't freedom from. It's freedom to. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up; I forget them almost immediately. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I committed the first crime by creating men as mortals. After that, what more could you do, you the murderers? Come on; they already had death in them: at most you simply hastened things a little. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I will not be modest. Humble, as much as you like, but not modest. Modesty is the virtue of the lukewarm. — Jean-Paul Sartre

How far away from them I feel, up on this hill. It seems to me that I belong to another species. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Our job as a writer is to represent the world and to bear witness to it. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Don't be afraid; I'll keep looking at you for ever and ever, without a flutter of my eyelids, and you'll live in my gaze like a mote in a sunbeam. — Jean-Paul Sartre

This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it. — Jean-Paul Sartre

It's your weakness gives them their strength. Mark how they dare not speak to me. A nameless horror has descended on you, keeping us apart. And yet why should this be? What have you lived through that I have not shared? Do you imagine that my mother's cries will ever cease ringing in my ears? Or that my eyes will ever cease to see her great sad eyes, lakes of lambent darkness in the pallor of it will ever cease ravaging my heart? But what matter? I am free. Beyond anguish, beyond remorse. Free. And at one with myself. No, you must not loathe yourself, Electra. Give me your hand. I shall never forsake you. — Jean-Paul Sartre

To be responsible is to be the uncontested author of an event or thing. — Jean-Paul Sartre

When she was in Djibouti and I was in Aden, and I used to go and see her for twenty-four hours, she managed to multiply the misunderstandings between us until there were exactly sixty minutes before I had to leave; sixty minutes, just long enough to make you feel the seconds passing one by one. — Jean-Paul Sartre

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Black, like the circle, did not exist. — Jean-Paul Sartre

When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die. — Jean-Paul Sartre

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I maintain that inversion is the effect of neither a prenatal choice nor an endocrinal malformation nor even the passive and determined result of complexes. It is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating. — Jean-Paul Sartre

In love, one and one are one. — Jean-Paul Sartre