Quotes by Jean-Paul Sartre

Freedom only gives you something to be sorry for.

We are in hell, my dear, there is never a mistake and people are not damned for nothing.

It isn't freedom from. It's freedom to.

When I was little, my Aunt Bigeois told me 'If you look at yourself too long in the mirror, you'll see a monkey.' I must have looked at myself even longer than that: what I see is well below the monkey, on the fringe of the vegetable world, at the level of jellyfish.

Once freedom lights its beacon in a man's heart, the gods are powerless against him.

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

Life has no meaning a priori. It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.

The appearance of the other in the world corresponds therefore to a congealed sliding of the whole universe.

If you seek authenticity for authenticity's sake you are no longer authentic.

Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being like a worm.

The past is the luxury of proprietors.

Now I am weary and I can no longer tell good from Evil, and I need someone to show me the way.

When the rich wage war, it is the poor who die.

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

In reality, people read because they want to write. Anyway, reading is a sort of rewriting.

I will not be modest. Humble, as much as you like, but not modest. Modesty is the virtue of the lukewarm.

Jazz is like bananas -- it must be consumed on the spot.

This cold is so pure, this night so pure: am I myself not a wave of icy air? With neither blood, nor lymph, nor flesh. Flowing down this long canal towards the pallor down there. To be nothing but coldness.

Once they have been to bed together, they will have to find something else to conceal the enormous absurdity of their existence.

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.

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

Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.

Emotion is first of all and in principle an accident.

With a little luck that epoch may arrive. I am on the side of those who think that things will go better when the world has changed.

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

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.

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

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

I am alone now. Not quite alone. Hovering in front of me is still this idea. It has rolled itself into a ball, it stays there like a large cat; it explains nothing, it does not move, and contents itself with saying no.

It answers the question that was tormenting you: my love, you are not 'one thing in my life' -- not even the most important -- because my life no longer belongs to me because...you are always me.

Man lives in the midst of images. Literature offers him a critical image of himself.

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

Philosophy which does not help to illuminate the process of the liberation of the oppressed should be rejected.

A kiss without a moustache, they said then, is like an egg without salt; I will add to it: and it is like Good without Evil.

Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.

At an age when most children are playing hopscotch or with their dolls,you, poor child, who had no friends or toys, you toyed with dreams of murder, because that is a game to play alone.

He raised himself on his hands and looked at Irene's face: the nudity of that feminine body had risen into her face, the body had reabsorbed it, as nature reabsorbs forsaken gardens.

Be self-indulgent, and those who are also self-indulgent will like you. Tear your neighbor to pieces, and the other neighbors will laugh. But if you beat your soul, all souls will cry out.

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

All men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

What would you expect to find when the muzzle that has silenced the voices of black men is removed?
That they would chant your praises?
Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?

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

Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.

I thought I saw Anny smiling. I try to refresh my memory: I need to feel all the tenderness that Anny inspires; it is there, this tenderness, it is near me, only asking to be born. But the smile does not return: it is finished. I remain dry and empty.

You have to talk to make sure you're alive.

The words I speak are too big for my mouth, they tear it; the load of destiny I bear is too heavy for my youth and has shattered it.

Why distort a past that can no longer stand up for itself?

So I was a poodle of the future; I made prophecies.

They are young and well built, they have another thirty years ahead of them. So they don't hurry, they take their time, and they are quite right. Once they have been to bed together, they will have to find something else to conceal the enormous absurdity of their existence.

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.

You see, I'm fond of teasing, it's a second nature with me--and I'm used to teasing myself. Plaguing myself, if you prefer; I don't tease nicely.

Amuse yourself, torment your desires. Drink when you're thirsty -- that would be very much too simple! If you didn't harbour a temptation eternally in your soul, you'd run the risk of forgetting yourself.

Like morality, literature needs to be universal. So that the writer must put himself on the side of the majority, of the two billion starving, if he wishes to be able to speak to all and be read by all. Failing that, he is at the service of a privileged class and, like it, an exploiter.

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

All I can do is make the best of what I am, become accustomed to it, evaluate the possibilities, and take advantage of them the best I can.

My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.

Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins.

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

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

Contemporary writer could be a kind of Samuel Beckett who would not be felt to be totally committed to despair.

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.

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

Therefore, in the nature of this will for freedom, which freedom itself implies, I may pass judgement on those who seek to hide from themselves the complete arbitrariness and the complete freedom of their existence.

What do you want to do with the Communist Party? A racing stable? What good is it to sharpen a knife every day if you never useit for slicing? A party is never more than a means. There is only one objective: power.

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.

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

That of War and Peace or of Almagestes. All are satisfactory. The only criterion of a work
is its validity: that it should grip and that it should last.

This desire to write is rather strange all the same and is not without a certain cracked quality.

That's what I must avoid: I mustn't put strangeness where there's nothing. I think that is the danger of keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything, you are on the look-out, and you continually stretch the truth.

Love or hatred calls for self-surrender. He cuts a fine figure, the warm-blooded, prosperous man, solidly entrenched in his well-being, who one fine day surrenders all to love--or to hatred; himself, his house, his land, his memories.

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

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

When a man gets drunk he gets sentimental. That's what I wanted to avoid.

If I didn't try to assume responsibility for my own existence, it would seem utterly absurd to go on existing.

When we love animals and children too much, we love them at the expense of men.

One of the chief motives of artistic creation is certainly the need of feeling that we are essential in relationship to the world.

I was a neophyte in another world in 1954.

Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man.

Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them... there is nothing.

If you die, I will lie down beside you and I will stay there until the end, without eating or drinking, you will rot in my arms and I will love you as carcass: for you love nothing if you do not love everything.

For the artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is enchanted with it.

Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the gods can do nothing against that man.

Once we know and are aware, we are responsible for our action and our inaction. We can do something about it or ignore it. Either way, we are still responsible.

I have nothing but contempt for you idiotic chosen ones who have the heart to rejoice when there are the damned in Hell and the poor on earth; as for me, I am on the side of men and I will not leave it.

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.

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.

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

People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing.

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

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

Death is a continuation of my life without me.