Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

[Contemporary writer] could be a kind of [Samuel] Beckett who would not be felt to be totally committed to despair.

At times discreetly, at times disgustingly, I yielded to the most fatal temptation whenever I could no longer bear it: as a result of impatience, Orpheus lost Eurydice; as a result of impatience, I lost myself.

I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.

So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: Hell is other people.

I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved. These are honest hypotheses which take the facts into account: but I sense so definitely that they come from me, and that they are simply a way of unifying my own knowledge. Not a glimmer comes from Rollebon's side. Slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves to the rigour of the order I wish to give them; but it remains outside of them. I have the feeling of doing a work of pure imagination.

I am not recommending "popular" literature which aims at the lowest.

Two people can form a community by excluding a third.

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

This then is the age of reason.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

I should wish [Alain Robbe-Grillet] to realize that Guinea exists.

Man is abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no aim but what he sets himself.

It is too early to love. We will buy the right to do so by shedding blood.

To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June

Like morality, literature needs to be universal. So that the writer must put himself on the side of the majority, of the two billion starving, if he wishes to be able to speak to all and be read by all. Failing that, he is at the service of a privileged class and, like it, an exploiter.

The more absurd life is, the more insupportable death is.

Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom-ah the soul-destroying boredom-of long days of mild content.

So it comes to this; one doesn’t need rest. Why bother about sleep if one isn’t sleepy? That stands to reason, doesn’t it? Wait a minute, there’s a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why, now, should it be disagreeable? …Ah, I see; it’s life without a break.

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

The consciousness that says 'I am' is not the consciousness that thinks.

I had spent my time counterfeiting eternity.

Every human endeavor, however singular it seems, involves the whole human race.

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

I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

When the rich [and politically powerful] make war, it's the poor [and politically weak] who die.

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.

This desire [to write] is rather strange all the same and is not without a certain "cracked" quality.

A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

Torture is senseless violence, born in fear... torture costs human lives but does not save them. We would almost be too lucky if these crimes were the work of savages: the truth is that torture makes torturers.

I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.