Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

Some men are born committed to action: they do not have a choice, they have been thrown on a path, at the end of that path, an act awaits them, their act.

The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

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

The lad who dreams of being a boxing champion or an admiral chooses reality. If the writer chooses the imaginary, he confuses the two.

We do not wish to say only that a man is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for that of all men.

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

The viable jewels of life remain untouched when man forgets his vocation of searching for the truth of his existence.

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.

In a country lacking leaders, in Africa, for instance, how could a native educated in Europe refuse to become a professor, even at the price of his literary vocation?

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.

Nothingness haunts Being.

I consider Les Nourritures Terrestres as a frightening book: "Look for God in no other place than everywhere." Go and tell that to a workman, an engineer!

I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then anything, anything could happen.

The form [of literature] matters little to me, classical or not.

I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.

Genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out.

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

I had been playing with matches and burned a small rug. I was in the process of covering up my crime when suddenly God saw me. I felt His gaze inside my head and on my hands....I flew into a rage against so crude an indiscretion, I blasphemed....He never looked at me again....I had the more difficulty getting rid of Him the Holy Ghost in that He had installed Himself at the back of my head....I collared the Holy Ghost in the cellar and threw Him out.

In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.

I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.

What the painter adds to the canvas are the days of his life. The adventure of living, hurtling toward death.

You must be like me; you must suffer in rhythm.

Little flashes of sun on the surface of a cold, dark sea.

An individual chooses and makes himself.

Introspection is always retrospection

I was a neophyte in another world [in 1954].

But 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.

What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.

I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.

My eyes feel all soft, all soft as flesh. I'm going to sleep.

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

I needed to justify my existence, and I had made an absolute of literature. It took me thirty years to get rid of this state of mind.

I think there is an enormous diference between speaking and writing. One rereads what one writes. But one might read it slowly or quickly. In other words, you do not know how long you will have to spend deliberating over a sentence. ... But if I listen to a tape recorder, the listening time is determined by the speed at which the tape turns and not by my own needs.

There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. [It is a matter of choice, not chance.] Such is the first principle of existentialism.

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

He loves me, he doesn't love my bowels, if they showed him my appendix in a glass he wouldn't recognize it, he's always feeling me, but if they put the glass in his hands he wouldn't touch it, he wouldn't think, "that's hers," you ought to love all of somebody, the esophagus, the liver, the intestines. Maybe we don't love them because we aren't used to them, but if we saw them the way we saw our hands and arms maybe we'd love them; the starfish must love each other better than we do.

What I ask of [the writer] is not to ignore the reality and the fundamental problems that exist. The world's hunger, the atomic threat, the alienation of man, I am astonished that they do not color all our literature.

I have always been happy. Even if I had been more honest with regard to myself at that moment I should still have written La Nausee.

You see, the contemporary writer must write through his intimations of unease, while trying to elucidate them.

We make our own hell out of the people around us.

What I regretted in La Nausee was not to have put myself completely into the thing. I remained outside my hero's disease, protected by my neurosis which, through writing, gave me happiness.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think… and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.

God is absence. God is the solitude of man.

Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.

When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.

Man is what he wills himself to be.