Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes essence.

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.

Outside nature, against nature, without excuse, beyond remedy, except what remedy I find within myself.

Violence is good for those who have nothing to lose.

It's just what people do when they're getting old, when they're sick of themselves and their life; they think of money and take care of themselves.

I think [Alain Robbe-Grillet] a good writer, but he speaks to the comfortable bourgeoisie.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

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.

Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.

For the artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is enchanted with it.

Why do you keep maintaining your ideas are right if you can't prove them?

It is enough that one man hate another for hate to gain, little by little, all mankind.

I am responsible for everything... except my very responsibility.

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

Your scare me rather. My reflection in the glass never did that; of course, I knew it so well. Like something I had tamed...I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.

It’s the well-behaved children that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don’t say a word, they don’t hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on, they make society pay dearly.

Man is condemned to be free

Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.

Commitment is an act, not a word.

To love is never just to love since it is also to will to love, and ... to love in spite of oneself, to allow oneself to be overcome by one's love.

Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound and secret delirium of nature — could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. 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. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it.

If you begin by saying, 'Thou shalt not lie,' there is no longer any possibility of political action.

I have such a desire to sleep and am so much behind my sleep. A good night, one good night and all this nonsense will be swept away.

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

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

I enjoy feeling fastidious and aloof. I enjoy saying no, always no, and I should be afraid of any attempt to construct a finally habitable world, because I should merely have to say - Yes; and act like other people.

Then I realized what separated us: what I thought about him could not reach him; it was psychology, the kind they write about in books. But his judgment went through me like a sword and questioned my very right to exist. And it was true, I had always realized it; I hadn't the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe. My life put out feelers towards small pleasures in every direction. Sometimes it sent out vague signals; at other times I felt nothing more than a harmless buzzing.

Originally, poetry creates the myth, while the prose-writer draws its portrait.

When we love animals and children too much, we love them at the expense of men.

Death is a continuation of my life without me.

your judgement judges you and defines you

I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.

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

Therefore, in the nature of this will for freedom, which freedom itself implies, I may pass judgement on those who seek to hide from themselves the complete arbitrariness and the complete freedom of their existence.

I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.

The sun is not ridiculous, quite the contrary. On everything I like, on the rust of the construction girders, on the rotten boards of the fence, a miserly, uncertain light falls, like the look you give, after a sleepless night, on decisions made with enthusiasm the day before, on pages you have written in one spurt without crossing out a word.

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

I exist. It's sweet, so sweet, so slow. And light: you'd think it floated all by itself. It stirs. It brushes by me, melts and vanishes. Gently, gently. There is bubbling water in my mouth. I swallow. It slides down my throat, it caresses me — and now it comes up again into my mouth. For ever I shall have a little pool of whitish water in my mouth - lying low - grazing my tongue. And this pool is still me. And the tongue. And the throat is me.

There are photographers who push for war because they make stories. They search for a Chinese who has a more Chinese are than the others and they end up finding one. They have him take a typically Chinese pose and surround him with chinoiseries. What have they captured on their film? A Chinese? Definitely not: the idea of the Chinese.

Uncalled-for aggression arouses the hatred of the civilian population.

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.

It is no longer possible to escape men. Farewell to the monsters, farewell to the saints. Farewell to pride. All that is left is men.

What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal... For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space.

It is only in our decisions that we are important.

There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.

Life is a useless passion.

Words are loaded pistols.