Top 100 Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes
#1. The Nausea has stayed down there, in the yellow light. I am happy: this cold is so pure, this night so pure: am I myself not a wave of icy air? With neither blood, nor lymph, nor flesh. Flowing down this long canal towards the pallor down there. To be nothing but coldness.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#5. You're lucky. I'm always conscious of myself - in my mind. Painfully conscious.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#6. Nothing that exists can be comic; it was like a floating analogy, almost entirely elusive, with certain aspects of vaudeville.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#8. I marvel at these young people: drinking their coffee, they tell clear, plausible stories. If they are asked what they did yesterday, they aren't embarrassed: they bring you up to date in a few words. If I were in their place, I'd fall all over myself.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#9. I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#10. One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#11. She smiled and said with an ecstatic air: "It shines like a little diamond",
"What does?"
"This moment. It is round, it hangs in empty space like a little diamond; I am eternal.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#13. I clung to nothing, in a way I was calm. But it was a horrible calm - because of my body; my body, I saw with its eyes, I heard with its ears, but it was no longer me; it sweated and trembled by itself and I didn't recognize it any more.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#14. He takes a few dazed steps, the waiters turn out the lights and he slips into unconsciousness: when this man is lonely he sleeps.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#15. 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.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#16. I've lived the life of a man without teeth, he thought about it. A life of a man without teeth. I've never bitten, I've been waiting, keeping myself for later - and now I've just ascertained that I don't have teeth anymore.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#17. The bond between being and non-being can be only internal. It is within being qua being that non-being must arise, and within non-being that being must spring up; and this relation can not be a fact, a natural law, but an upsurge of the being which is its own nothingness of being.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#18. 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.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#19. Human feeling. That's beyond my range. I'm rotten to the core.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#20. Lucien thought with bitter pleasure that his parents found him looking fine. "I don't exist." He closed his eyes and let himself drift: existence is an illusion because I know I don t exist, all I have to do is plug my ears and not think about anything and I'll become nothingness.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#21. I had been born in order to fill
the great need I had of myself.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#22. Suddenly they existed, then suddenly they existed no longer: existence is without memory; of the vanished it retains nothing - not even a memory. Existence everywhere, infinitely, in excess, for ever and everywhere; existence - which is limited only by existence.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#23. If a Jew is fascinated by Christians it is not because of their virtues, which he values little, but because they represent anonymity, humanity without race.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#24. A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#25. When you want to understand something you stand in front of it, alone, without help: all the past in the world is of no use.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#26. Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#28. The sun was clear and diaphanous like white win. Its light barely touched the moving figures, gave them no shadow, no relief: faces and hands made spots of pale gold.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#29. It is enough that one man hate another for hate to gain, little by little, all mankind.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#30. Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#31. Existence is without memory; of the vanished it retains nothing - not even a memory.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#32. My memories are like coins in the devil's purse: when you open it you find only dead leaves.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#33. All-powerful god, who am I but the fear that I inspire in others?
Jean-Paul Sartre
#34. Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#35. We cannot withdraw our cards from the game. Were we as silent and mute as stones, our very passivity would be an act.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#36. I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It
always made me want to do just the opposite.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#38. 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.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#39. When one does nothing, one believes oneself responsible for everything.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#40. Handing over a bank note is enough to make a bicycle belong to me, but my entire life is needed to realize this possession.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#41. It was odd, he thought, that a man could hate himself as though he were someone else.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#42. In any case, if you ever leave me with a handsome man, do not tell me that you trust me because, let me warn you: that is not what will prevent me from deceiving you, if I want to. On the contrary.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#43. In order to make myself recognized by the Other, I must risk my own life. To risk one's life, in fact, is to reveal oneself as not-bound to the objective form or to any determined existence
- as not-bound to life.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#44. I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence
Jean-Paul Sartre
#45. Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#47. 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
#50. A search for justification and the impossibility of justification are recurrent motifs in the philosophy of Sartre. His philosophy is one of the incarnations of problematism and of the ambiguity of contemporary thought (for Man does seem, to the contemporary mind, to be ambiguous).
Jean-Paul Sartre
#51. Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man ...
Jean-Paul Sartre
#52. I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#53. We are in hell, my dear, there is never a mistake and people are not damned for nothing.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#54. To keep hope alive one must, in spite of all mistakes, horrors, and crimes, recognize the obvious superiority of the socialist camp.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#56. But the end is there, transforming everything. For us, the man is already the hero of the story. His moroseness, his money troubles are much more precious than ours, they are all gilded by the light of future passions.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#57. What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#58. A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#59. All of us abandon ourselves to existence, because we were among
ourselves, only among ourselves, it has taken us unawares, in the disorder, the day to day drift: I am
ashamed for myself and for what exists in front of it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#60. Men equally honest, equally devoted to their fatherland, are momentarily separated by different conceptions of their duty.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#61. For common minds have an ugly ability to perceive in the deepest and richest saying nothing but their own everyday opinion.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#62. Be self-indulgent, and those who are also self-indulgent will like you. Tear your neighbor to pieces, and the other neighbors will laugh. But if you beat your soul, all souls will cry out.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#63. There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#65. Three o'clock. Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. An odd moment in the afternoon.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#66. I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#67. Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#68. Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#69. What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterward.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#70. Existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#72. A human being who wakened in the morning with a queesy stomach, with fifteen hours to kill before next bedtime, had not much use for freedom.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#73. Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#75. Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#76. Life gave me everything I asked
If all I asked was not a great deal, that's my problem!
Jean-Paul Sartre
#78. And you know what wickedness is, and shame, and fear. There were days when you peered into yourself, into the secret places of your heart, and what you saw there made you faint with horror.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#80. I feel there are no more perfect moments. I feel it in my legs when I walk. I feel it all the time, even when I sleep. I can't forget it. I am dazzled, uncomfortable, I can't get used to it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#81. 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.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#82. A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness ... and suddenly the "I" pales, pales, and fades out.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#83. L'homme est condamne a' e tre libre. Man is condemned to be free.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#84. Thus pleasure itself, also becoming a right, lost its aggressive futility.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#85. Perhaps there is nothing in the world I cling to as much as this feeling of adventure; but it comes when it pleases; it is gone so quickly and how empty I am once it has left. Does it, ironically, pay me these short visits in order to show me that I have wasted my life?
Jean-Paul Sartre
#86. Several hours or several years make no difference once you have lost eternity.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#87. Her eyes stare at me but she seems not to see me; she looks as though she were lost in her suffering.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#88. All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#89. It is not the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner. A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honorable form.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#90. I thought I saw Anny smiling. I try to refresh my memory: I need to feel all the tenderness that Anny inspires; it is there, this tenderness, it is near me, only asking to be born. But the smile does not return: it is finished. I remain dry and empty.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#91. [E]very man ought to say to himself, Am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?
Jean-Paul Sartre
#92. Il n'y a pas d'autre univers qu'un univers humain, l'univers de la subjectivite humaine. There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#93. If you begin by saying, 'Thou shalt not lie,' there is no longer any possibility of political action.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#94. A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#96. Perhaps its inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#97. Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#98. The simplest, most indefinable quality had too much content, in relation to itself, in its heart.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#99. My passion was dead. For years it had rolled over and submerged me; now I felt empty. But that wasn't the worst: before me, posed with a sort of indolence, was a voluminous, insipid idea. I did not see clearly what it was, but it sickened me so much I couldn't look at it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#100. Perception is naturally surpassed toward action; better yet, it can be revealed only in and through projects of action. The world is revealed as an "always future hollow", for we are always future to ourselves.
Jean-Paul Sartre
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