Jean Paul Sartre Quotes

One does not adopt a new idea, one slips into it.

Jean-Paul Sartre

A man is what he wills himself to be.

Jean-Paul Sartre

If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Hell is other people.

Jean-Paul Sartre

A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.

Jean-Paul Sartre

It is only in our decisions that we are important.

Jean-Paul Sartre

I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be. 

Jean-Paul Sartre

The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.

Jean-Paul Sartre

It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Words are loaded pistols.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Man is condemned to be free.

Jean-Paul Sartre

To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Life begins on the other side of despair.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them. 

Jean-Paul Sartre

We invent ourselves by virtue of the multitude of our choices.

Jean-Paul Sartre

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. 

Jean-Paul Sartre

I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Slime is the agony of water.

Jean-Paul Sartre

There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.

Jean-Paul Sartre

In love, one and one are one.

Jean-Paul Sartre

When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell a story.

Jean-Paul Sartre

A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.

Jean-Paul Sartre

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

Jean-Paul Sartre

You are your life, and nothing else.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think. 

Jean-Paul Sartre

When the rich wage war it is the poor who die.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Existence precedes and rules essence.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.

Jean-Paul Sartre

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

Jean-Paul Sartre

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

Jean-Paul Sartre

If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Nothingness haunts being.

Jean-Paul Sartre

God is absence. God is the solitude of man.

Jean-Paul Sartre

We are our choices.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

Jean-Paul Sartre

I know only one Church: it is the society of men.

Jean-Paul Sartre

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

Jean-Paul Sartre

As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

Jean-Paul Sartre

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

Jean-Paul Sartre

It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

Jean-Paul Sartre

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget. 

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

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

I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.

Jean-Paul Sartre

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.

Jean-Paul Sartre

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.

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

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Man is not the sum of what he has but the totality of what he does not yet have, of what he might have. 

Jean-Paul Sartre

I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens. 

Jean-Paul Sartre

If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.

Jean-Paul Sartre

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

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

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.

Jean-Paul Sartre

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?

Jean-Paul Sartre

Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

Jean-Paul Sartre (The Devil and the Good Lord, 1951)

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

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.

Jean-Paul Sartre

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.

Jean-Paul Sartre

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.

Jean-Paul Sartre

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.

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

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.

Jean-Paul Sartre

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.

Jean-Paul Sartre

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.

Jean-Paul Sartre

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.

Jean-Paul Sartre

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.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre Biography

Born: June 21, 1905
Died: April 15, 1980

Jean Paul Sartre was a French philosopher and writer. He is most commonly recognized for his philosophical theories on existentialism.

Notable Works

Nausea (1938)
Being and Nothingness
(1943)
The Flies (1943)
No Exit (1944)
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)
Signature

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