Jean Paul Sartre Quotes
One does not adopt a new idea, one slips into it.
A man is what he wills himself to be.
If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.
Hell is other people.
A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.
It is only in our decisions that we are important.
I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.
The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.
It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
Words are loaded pistols.
Man is condemned to be free.
To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.
Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
Life begins on the other side of despair.
Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.
Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.
We invent ourselves by virtue of the multitude of our choices.
She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.
I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.
Slime is the agony of water.
There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.
Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.
In love, one and one are one.
When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell a story.
A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.
No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.
You are your life, and nothing else.
Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.
When the rich wage war it is the poor who die.
Existence precedes and rules essence.
Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.
Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.
Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.
Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.
If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.
If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.
Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.
Nothingness haunts being.
God is absence. God is the solitude of man.
We are our choices.
Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.
I know only one Church: it is the society of men.
I hate victims who respect their executioners.
As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.
It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.
That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.
Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.
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.
I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.
There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.
Everything is gratuitous, this garden, this city and myself. When you suddenly realize it, it makes you feel sick and everything begins to drift...that's nausea.
We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.
It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.
Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.
Man is not the sum of what he has but the totality of what he does not yet have, of what he might have.
I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.
If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light.
Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.
My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.
I will not be modest. Humble, as much as you like, but not modest. Modesty is the virtue of the lukewarm.
If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically.
There is a universe behind and before him. And the day is approaching when closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left; he will say to himself, "now what?
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.
Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.
Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not. He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to recover his inner being.
Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.
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.
This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.
But you have to choose: live or tell.
I am responsible for everything except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being. Therefore everything takes place as if I were compelled to be responsible. I am abandoned in the world... in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and 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.
We write for our contemporaries; we want to behold our world not with future eyes—which would be the surest means of killing it—but with our eyes of flesh, our real, perishable eyes. We don't want to win our, case on appeal, and we will have nothing to do with any posthumous rehabilitation. Right here in our own lifetime is when and where our cases will be won or lost.
The existentialist...thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be a priori of God, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is that we are on a plane where there are only men. Dostoyevsky said, If God didn't exist, everything would be possible. That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to.
Existentialism is nothing less than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position. It isn't trying to plunge man into despair at all. But if one calls every attitude of unbelief despair, like the Christians, then the word is not being used in its original sense. Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing. There you've got our point of view. Not that we believe that God exists, but we think that the problem of His existence is not the issue. In this sense, existentialism is optimistic, a doctrine of action, and it is plain dishonesty for Christians to make no distinction between their own despair and ours and then to call us despairing.