Sartre Free Will Quotes & Sayings

Jupiter: I am not your king, impudent larva? Who then has created you?
Orestes: You. But you should not have created me free. — 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

L'homme est condamne a' e tre libre. Man is condemned to be free. — 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

The writer, a free man adressing free men, has only one subject - freedom — Jean-Paul Sartre

Humans are, as Sartre put it, 'condemned to be free'. To insist that science, or God, objectively defines moral values is to abandon our responsibility as human beings to make such judgments. — Kenan Malik

The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free, Aegistheus. You know it and they do not. — Jean-Paul Sartre

We are abandoned in the world ... in the sense that we find ourselves suddenly alone and without help. Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Where shall I keep mine? You don't put your past in your pocket; you have to have a house. I have only my body: a man entirely alone, with his lonely body, cannot indulge in memories; they pass through him. I shouldn't complain: all I wanted was to be free. — Jean-Paul Sartre

She is dearer to me than life. But her suffering comes from within, and only she can rid herself of it. For she is free. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Man being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Because we can imagine, we are free. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Man is free rather than man is freedom. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Freedom as a given seems the very antithesis of death. While we dread death, we generally consider freedom to be unequivocally positive. Has not the history of Western civilization been punctuated with yearnings for freedom, even driven by it? Yet freedom from an existential perspective is bonded to anxiety in asserting that, contrary to everyday experience, we do not enter into, and ultimately leave, a well-structured universe with an eternal grand design. Freedom means that one is responsible for one's own choices, actions, one's own life situation. Though the word responsible may be used in a variety of ways, I prefer Sartre's definition: to be responsible is to "be the author of," each of us being thus the author of his or her own life design. We are free to be anything but unfree: we are, Sartre would say, condemned to freedom. — Irvin D. Yalom

Happiness has to be installed in each person as a state of affairs completely cut off from the process that brought it about and, in particular, from the real situation. Man has to be affected with happiness. It is a tonality given to him. Contradiction: if one does take care to give him happiness, it is because he is a free creature
but in order to give it to him, one turns him into an object. — Jean-Paul Sartre

But what a poor lie: no one has any rights; they are entirely free, like other men, they cannot succeed in not feeling superfluous. And in themselves, secretly, they are superfluous, that is to say, amorphous, vague, and sad. How — Jean-Paul Sartre

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

The things that were needed to keep the imagination free were "all written down in this age of reason." It was time to take the opportunity to use this imagination. All bets were off, "Fire at will." Standing next to the message in Pulling Punches, where there was only the faintest hint of solace, the message in The Ink in the Well seemed to be that in Picasso, Cocteau, and Sartre, a home of sorts had been found that went some way to - if not answering the questions - opening the mind to give the insight possible to find the answers. The references to Sartre and Cocteau were oblique and hidden in the phrase "The blood of a poet, the ink in the well, it's all written down in this age of reason. — Christopher E. Young

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 am free: there is absolutely no more reason for living, all the ones I have tried have given way and I can't imagine any more of them. — 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

Yes, I am so free. And what a superb absence is my soul. — Jean-Paul Sartre

You and me are real people, operating in a real world. We are not figments of each other's imagination. I am the architect of my own self, my own character and destiny. It is no use whingeing about what I might have been, I am the things I have done and nothing more. We are all free, completely free. We can each do any damn thing we want. Which is more than most of us dare to imagine. — Jean-Paul Sartre

That is the idea I shall try to convey when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, in other respects is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. The existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never agree that a sweeping passion is a ravaging torrent which fatally leads a man to certain acts and is therefore an excuse. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Man is condemned to be free; — Jean-Paul Sartre

A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
It is up to you to give [life] a meaning. — Jean-Paul Sartre

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 death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being. — Jean-Paul Sartre

The plight of modern man is that he is condemmed to be free. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Nevertheless we are free individuals, and this freedom condemns us to make choices throughout our lives. There are no eternal values or norms we can adhere to, which makes our choices even more significant. Because we are totally responsible for everything we do. Sartre emphasized that man must never disclaim the responsibility for his actions. Nor can we avoid the responsibility of making our own choices on the grounds that we "must" go to work, or we "must" live up to certain middle-class expectations regarding how we should live. Those who thus slip into the anonymous masses will never be other than members of the impersonal flock, having fled from themselves into self-deception. On the other hand our freedom obliges us to make something of ourselves, to live "authentically" or "truly". — Jostein Gaarder

Well, you're free without wanting to be,' he explained, 'it just happens so, that's all. But Mathieu's freedom is based on reason.'
'I still don't understand,' said Lola, shaking her head.
'Well, he doesn't care a curse about his apartment: he lives there just as he would live anywhere else, and I've got the feeling that he doesn't care much about his girl. He stays with her because he must sleep with someone. His freedom isn't visible, it's inside him. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I am free,' he said suddenly. And his joy changed, on the spot, to a crushing sense of anguish. — Jean-Paul Sartre

She suffers as a miser. She must be miserly with her pleasures, as well. I wonder if sometimes she doesn't wish she were free of this monotonous sorrow, of these mutterings which start as soon as she stops singing, if she doesn't wish to suffer once and for all, to drown herself in despair. In any case, it would be impossible for her: she is bound. — Jean-Paul Sartre