Quotes by Jean-Paul Sartre

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

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

We are our choices.

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

We do not judge the people we love.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

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.

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.

Nothingness haunts Being.

The more one is absorbed in fighting evil, the less one is tempted to place the good in question.

In love, one and one are one.

I said to myself, 'I want to die decently.'

What I lacked in La Nausee was a sense of reality. I have changed since. I have slowly learned to experience reality.

I have changed as everyone changes: within a permanency.

Naturally, in the course of my life I have made lots of mistakes, large and small, for one reason or another, but at the heart of it all, every time I made a mistake it was because I was not radical enough.

To keep hope alive one must, in spite of all mistakes, horrors, and crimes, recognize the obvious superiority of the socialist camp.

In the state I was in, if someone had come and told me I could go home quietly, that they would leave me my life whole, it would have left me cold: several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.

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

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

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

Everything in my past, in my training, everything that has been most essential in my activity up to now has made me above all a man who writes, and it is too late for that to change.

Your scare me rather. My reflection in the glass never did that; of course, I knew it so well. Like something I had tamed...I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.

Farewell, beautiful
lilies, elegant in your painted little sanctuaries, good-bye, lovely lilies, our pride and reason for
existing, good-bye you bastards!

He takes a few dazed steps, the waiters turn out the lights and he slips into unconsciousness: when this man is lonely he sleeps.

Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face ... People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked? You might say -- yes you might say, nature without humanity.

Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it any more. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.

The Nausea has stayed down there, in the yellow light. I am happy: 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.

You exaggerate everything. You continually force the truth because you're always looking for something.

The Nausea has not left me and I don't believe it will leave me so soon; but I no longer have to bear it, it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is I.

Others quite new when covered with ice, all white, all throbbing, are like swans about to fly, but the earth has already caught them from below. They twist and tear themselves from the mud, only to be flattened out a little further on.

My existence began to worry me seriously. Was I not a simple spectre?

I know very well that I don't want to do anything: to do something is to create existence--and there's quite enough existence as it is.

People. You must love people. Men are admirable. I want
to vomit--and suddenly, there it is: the Nausea.

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.

Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of form a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast -- or else there is nothing at all.

I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

What I regretted in La Nausee was not to have put myself completely into the thing. I remained outside my hero's disease, protected by my neurosis which, through writing, gave me happiness.

Violence is good for those who have nothing to lose.

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

When I can't see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself just to make sure, but it doesn't help much.

I've dropped out of their hearts like a little sparrow fallen from its nest.

I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.

Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.

So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: Hell is other people.

You are -- your life, and nothing else.

Man is what he wills himself to be.

At times discreetly, at times disgustingly, I yielded to the most fatal temptation whenever I could no longer bear it: as a result of impatience, Orpheus lost Eurydice; as a result of impatience, I lost myself.

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

All-powerful god, who am I but the fear that I inspire in others?

The recent experiences of pocketbooks prove this. I have changed my public since my works have been published in a smaller format.

Thrown into the atmosphere of action in 1954, I suddenly understood the kind of neurosis that dominated all my previous work. I had not been able to recognize it before: I was inside. Simone de Beauvoir had guessed these reasons before I did.

I enjoy feeling fastidious and aloof. I enjoy saying no, always no, and I should be afraid of any attempt to construct a finally habitable world, because I should merely have to say -- Yes; and act like other people.

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

There were days when you peered into yourself, into the secret places of your heart, and what you saw there made you faint with horror. And then, next day, you didn't know what to make of it,you couldn't interpret the horror you had glimpsed the day before. Yes, you know what evil costs.

Torture is senseless violence, born in fear... torture costs human lives but does not save them. We would almost be too lucky if these crimes were the work of savages: the truth is that torture makes torturers.

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.

Two people can form a community by excluding a third.

I needed to justify my existence, and I had made an absolute of literature. It took me thirty years to get rid of this state of mind.

Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.

Lord, you have cursed Cain and Cain's children: thy will be done. You have allowed men's hearts to be corrupted, that their intentions be rotten, that their actions putrefy and stink: thy will be done.

First all men must be able to become men by the improvement of their conditions of existence, so that a universal morality can be created. If I begin by saying to them: Thou
shalt not lie, there is no longer any possibility of political action. What matters first is the liberation of man.

I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.

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

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

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!

I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.

When she is alone in the rooms I hear her humming to keep herself from thinking.

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

We cannot withdraw our cards from the game. Were we as silent and mute as stones, our very passivity would be an act.

Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.

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

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

The public, too, has to make an effort in order to understand the writer who, though he renounce complacent obscurity, cannot always express his new-hidden thoughts lucidly and according to accepted models.

The status of 'native' is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent.

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.

A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.

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.

I consider Les Nourritures Terrestres as a frightening book: Look for God in no other place than everywhere. Go and tell that to a workman, an engineer!

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 distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence.

The first crime was mine: I committed it when I made man mortal. Once I had done that, what was left for you, poor human murderers, to do? To kill your victims? But they already had the seed of death in them; all you could do was to hasten its fruition by a year or two.

Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom--ah the soul-destroying boredom--of long days of mild content.

The viable jewels of life remain untouched when man forgets his vocation of searching for the truth of his existence.

I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.

Ideas come in pairs and they contradict one another; their opposition is the principal engine of reflection.

Hell is--other people!

In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.

The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

Hell is other people at breakfast.

Still, somewhere in the depths of ourselves we all harbor an ashamed, unsatisfied melancholy that quietly awaits a funeral.

Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.

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.

I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good.

To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June.

It's the well-behaved children that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don't say a word, they don't hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on, they make society pay dearly.

To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.

People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?