Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.

I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.

It is always more valuable to report the truth.

It is meaningless that we are born, it is meaningless that we die.

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

I wanted my own words. But the ones I use have dragged through I don't know how many consciences.

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

One does not adopt a new idea, one slips into it.

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.

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.

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.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

Uncalled-for aggression arouses the hatred of the civilian population.

Something begins in order to end: an adventure doesn't let itself be extended it achieves significance only through its death.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

Introspection is always retrospection

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

The characteristic of every neurosis is to represent itself as natural.

Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.

To think new thoughts you have to break the bones in your head

The coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic.

Some of these days, Oh, you'll miss me honey

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

Photographs are not ideas. They give us ideas.

You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total... because it may well involve the whole world.

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

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

Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.

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.

Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.

Is there really nothing, nothing left of me?

Absurd, irreducible; nothing--not even a profound and secret delirium of nature--could explain [a tree root].

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

So much torture, bloodshed, deceit. You cannot make your young people practice torture twenty-four hours a day and not expect to pay a price for it.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

One should commit no stupidity twice, the variety of choice is, in the end, large enough.

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

What is not possible is not to choose.

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

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

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

I’ve dropped out of their hearts like a little sparrow fallen from its nest. So gather me up, dear, fold me to your heart – and you’ll see how nice I can be.

Criticism often takes from the tree caterpillars and blossoms together.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal... For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space.

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.

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

I had dreamed my life for nearly fifty years (I am about to be fifty-nine). But, you see, there are two tones in Les Mats: the echo of this condemnation and a mitigation of that severity.