Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes
Most popular Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes
You are your choices.
Hell is other people.
Words are loaded pistols.
Man is condemned to be free.
We do not judge the people we love.
Existence precedes and rules essence.
To eat is to appropriate by destruction.
Life begins on the other side of despair.
God is absence. God is the solitude of man.
I hate victims who respect their executioners.
When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.
We must act out passion before we can feel it.
It is only in our decisions that we are important.
Being is. Being is in—itself. Being is what it is.
A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.
Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?
I confused things with their names: that is belief.
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.
Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.
Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.
Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.
Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.
Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.
If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.
One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.
I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.
No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
A victory described in detail is indistinguishable from a defeat.
I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.
You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.
Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.
Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.
All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.
The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.
She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.
The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.
If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.
Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.
If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.
Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.
As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.
I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.
We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are— that is the fact.
That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.
For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.
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.
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.
What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.
My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.
Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.
I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.
It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.
One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.
If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically.
Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.
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.
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.
There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.
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.
Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.
Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavour.
