Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

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

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

We will not go to Heaven,Goetz, and even if we both entered it, we would not have eyes to see each other, nor hands to touch each other. Up there, God gets all the attention.... We can only love on this earth and against God.

This is the basis for the joy of love when there is joy; we feel that our existence is justified.

For the time being I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of all flabby masses which move spontaneously.

When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell a story: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow by too: you suddenly see people appear who speak and then go away; you plunge into stories of which you can't make head or tail: you'd make a terrible witness.

To be responsible is to be the uncontested author of an event or thing.

What do you want to do with the [Communist] Party? A racing stable? What good is it to sharpen a knife every day if you never useit for slicing? A party is never more than a means. There is only one objective: power.

I believe, I desire, that social and economic ills may be remedied.

Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of form a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all.

It is not a matter of indifference whether we like oysters or clams, snails or shrimp, if only we know how to unravel the existential significance of these foods.

As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.

God is the solitude of men. There was only me: I alone decided to commit Evil; alone, I invented Good. I am the one who cheated, I am the one who performed miracles, I am the one accusing myself today, I alone can absolve myself; me, the man.

I had realized in the meantime that action too has its difficulties, and that one can also be led to it by neurosis. We are not saved by politics any more than by literature.

We will freedom for freedom’s sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.

I considered calmly that I was born to write.

I must be without remorse or regrets as I am without excuse; for from the instant of my upsurge into being, I carry the weight of the world by myself alone 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.

When she is alone in the rooms I hear her humming to keep herself from thinking.

Acting is happy agony.

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

Sometimes the truth is too simple for intellectuals.

What is not possible is not to choose.

On my way to the office in the morning, there are, in front of me, behind me, other men going to their jobs. I see them; if I dared, I would smile at them. I think to myself that I am a socialist, that they are the purpose of my life, of my efforts and that they do not know it yet.

Let it crumble! Let the rocks revile me and flowers wilt at my coming. Your whole universe is not enough to prove me wrong. You are the king of gods, king of stones and stars, king of the waves of the sea. But you are not the king of man.

There is no book of mine that I reject. That does not mean that I find them good.

I will not be modest. Humble, as much as you like, but not modest. Modesty is the virtue of the lukewarm.

Perhaps its inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is.

As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

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

I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good.

When one does nothing, one believes oneself responsible for everything.

That is exactly the writer's problem. What does literature stand for in a hungry world?

Besides one should not believe that the people only want reading that is easy to absorb.

Man is the being whose project it is to be God.

If you die, I will lie down beside you and I will stay there until the end, without eating or drinking, you will rot in my arms and I will love you as carcass: for you love nothing if you do not love everything.

When my relations with the Communist Party gave me the necessary perspective I decided to write my autobiography. I wanted to show how a man can pass from literature held sacred to action which nevertheless remains that of an intellectual.

Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the of it is nothing other than the sense you choose.

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

Hell is for other people.

I do not understand! I understand nothing! I cannot understand nor do I want to understand! I want to believe! To Believe!

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.

Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself.

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

I committed the first crime by creating men as mortals. After that, what more could you do, you the murderers? Come on; they already had death in them: at most you simply hastened things a little.

When one loves animals and children too much, one loves them against human beings.

I will take it all: tongs, molten lead, prongs, garrotes, all that burns, all that tears, I want to truly suffer. Better one hundred bites, better the whip, vitriol, than this suffering in the head, this ghost of suffering which grazes and caresses and never hurts enough.