Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French novelist Jean-Paul Sartre.
Last updated on September 12, 2024.
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of Existentialism, a French playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, as well as a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to do so. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution."
It is only in our decisions that we are important.
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.
There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.
Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.
Hell is other people.
My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.
Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.
A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.
Life begins on the other side of despair.
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.
The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.
Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.
No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.
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.
It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.
The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.
Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.
I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.
Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.
Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.
When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.
Commitment is an act, not a word.
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
We must act out passion before we can feel it.
Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.
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.
That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.
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.
All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.
If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.
Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.
Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.
I confused things with their names: that is belief.
One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.
Existence precedes and rules essence.
Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.
Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.
If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.
Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.
Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.
She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.
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.
As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.
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.
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.
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.
Words are loaded pistols.
Acting is happy agony.
When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.
We do not judge the people we love.
Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.