Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

It is better; heavier, crueler. The mouth you wear for hell.

So long as one believes in God, one has the right to do the Good in order to be moral.

It is enough that one man hate another for hate to gain, little by little, all mankind.

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.

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

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

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.

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.

Man is always a wizard to man, and the social world is at first magical.

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.

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

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 considered calmly that I was born to write.

Never have I thought that I was the happy possessor of a "talent;" my sole concern has been to save myself by work and faith.

L'homme est une passion inutile. Man is a useless passion.

Man exists, turns up, appears on the scene and only afterwards, defines himself

To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.

How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?

Outside nature, against nature, without excuse, beyond remedy, except what remedy I find within myself.

I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books.

Take [Stéphane] Mallarme. I hold him to be the greatest of French poets, and I have taken some time to understand him !

I discovered suddenly that alienation, exploitation of man by man, under-nourishment, relegated to the background metaphysical evil which is a luxury.

If I relegate impossible Salvation to the prop room, what remains? A whole man, composed of all men and as good as all of them and no better than any.

The lad who dreams of being a boxing champion or an admiral chooses reality. If the writer chooses the imaginary, he confuses the two.

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

If you begin by saying, 'Thou shalt not lie,' there is no longer any possibility of political action.

it was odd, he thought, that a man could hate himself as though he were someone else.

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

Un homme n'est rien d'autre qu'une se rie d'entreprises. A man is no other than a series of undertakings.

L'homme est condamne a' e" tre libre. Man is condemned to be free.

Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes essence.

The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose, not his individuality, but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him.

A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.

I have seen children dying of hunger. Over against a dying child La Nausee cannot act as a counterweight.

Respectable society believed in God in order to avoid having to speak about him.

Men equally honest, equally devoted to their fatherland, are momentarily separated by different conceptions of their duty.

Existence is an imperfection.

I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.

There is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving.

He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?

The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.

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

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

I do not give a damn about the dead. They died for the [Communist] Party and the Party can decide what it wants. I practice a live man's politics, for the living.

Life is a useless passion.

I was escaping from Nature and at last becoming myself, that Other whom I was aspiring to be in the eyes of others.

I was a neophyte in another world [in 1954].