Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

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

Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.

Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.

We are our choices.

Before you come alive, life is nothing; it 's up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence.

I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.

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.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

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

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

There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

We do not judge the people we love.

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.

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.

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.

the worst part about being lied to is knowing you werent worth the truth

I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.

Sometimes the truth is too simple for intellectuals.

Hell is other people at breakfast.

Man is what he wills himself to be.

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

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

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light.

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.

Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.

The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.

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.

The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

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

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

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

I had spent my time counterfeiting eternity.

There are two ways of destroying a people. Either condemn them en bloc or force them to repudiate the leaders they adopted. The second is the worse.

I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.

If you want to deserve Hell, you need only stay in bed. The world is iniquity; if you accept it, you are an accomplice, if you change it you are an executioner.

That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

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

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

The individual's duty is to do what he wants to do, to think whatever he likes, to be accountable to no one but himself, to challenge every idea and every person.

To choose not to choose is still to act.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.