Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

Some men are born committed to action: they do not have a choice, they have been thrown on a path, at the end of that path, an act awaits them, their act.

There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.

Man is the being whose project it is to be God.

Yes, I am so free. And what a superb absence is my soul.

Everything is gratuitous, this garden, this city and myself. When you suddenly realize it, it makes you feel sick and everything begins to drift . . . that's nausea.

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

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.

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.

This then is the age of reason.

For common minds have an ugly ability to perceive in the deepest and richest saying nothing but their own everyday opinion.

A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness...and suddenly the “I” pales, pales, and fades out.

Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.

It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.

Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse.

What's done at night belongs to the night. In the daytime you don't talk about it.

emotion is first of all and in principle an accident

Everything comes to us from others. To Be is to belong to someone.

There is no salvation anywhere. The idea of salvation implies the idea of an absolute.

A madman's ravings are absurd in relation to the situation in which he finds himself, but not in relation to his madness.

Man is condemned to be free

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.

I had realized in the meantime that action too has its difficulties, and that one can also be led to it by neurosis. We are not saved by politics any more than by literature.

I committed the first crime by creating men as mortals. After that, what more could you do, you the murderers? Come on; they already had death in them: at most you simply hastened things a little.

A Soviet citizen, an official writer, once said to me: "The day when Communism (that is, well-being for everyone) reigns, man's tragedy will begin: his finitude."

It is no longer possible to escape men. Farewell to the monsters, farewell to the saints. Farewell to pride. All that is left is men.

I do not understand! I understand nothing! I cannot understand nor do I want to understand! I want to believe! To Believe!

I am myself and I am here.

One could only damage oneself through the harm one did to others. One could never get directly at oneself.

A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

An individual chooses and makes himself.

I am finishing a biography of [Gustave] Flaubert. Because he is the opposite of what I am. One needs to rub up against argument.

This is the basis for the joy of love when there is joy; we feel that our existence is justified.

The world would get along very well without literature. It would get along even better without man.

There it is: I am gently slipping into the water's depths, towards fear.

If I did not publish this autobiography [Les Mots] sooner and in its most radical form, it is because I considered it exaggerated.

The plight of modern man is that he is condemmed to be free.

As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.

To be responsible is to be the uncontested author of an event or thing.

Words There is no good father, that's the rule. Don't lay the blame on men but on the bond of paternity, which is rotten. To beget children, nothing better; to have them, what iniquity!

Hell is for other people.

Listen to me: a family man is never a real family man. An assassin is never entirely assassin. They play a role, you understand. While a dead man, he is really dead. To be or not to be, right?

I entered the Communist Party because its cause was just and I will leave it when it ceases to be just.

What never vary are the necessities of being in the world, of having to labor and to die there.

I have changed as everyone changes: within a permanency.

Man's existence precedes his essence

From the period when I wrote La Nausea I wanted to create a morality. My evolution consists in my no longer dreaming of doing so.

I have always been an optimist, perhaps even too much.

[Andre] Gide can say it to me: it is a writer's morality only addressed to a few privileged people. For that reason it no longer interests me.

As long as the writer cannot write for the two billion men who are hungry, he will be oppressed by a feeling of malaise.