Top 466 Quotes & Sayings by Jean-Paul Sartre - Page 3

In a word, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.

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

How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?

Man is what he wills himself to be.

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

The individual's duty is to do what he wants to do, to think whatever he likes, to be accountable to no one but himself, to challenge every idea and every person.

To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.

God is dead. Let us not understand by this that he does not exist or even that he no longer exists. He is dead. He spoke to us and is silent. We no longer have anything but his cadaver. Perhaps he slipped out of the world, somewhere else like the soul of a dead man. Perhaps he was only a dream...God is dead.

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

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.

It is disgusting -- Why must we have bodies?

It is meaningless that we are born, it is meaningless that we die.

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.

What is boredom? It is when there is simultaneously too much and not enough.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

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

Life gave me everything I asked If all I asked was not a great deal, that's my problem!

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

Photographs are not ideas. They give us ideas.

We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews.

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.

Genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out.

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?

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

I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.

That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst.

There are two kinds of existentialist; first, those who are Christian...and on the other hand the atheistic existentialists, among whom...I class myself. What they have in common is that they think that existence precedes essence, or, if you prefer, that subjectivity must be the turning point.

I have no religion, but if I were to choose one, it would be that of Shariati's.

Il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action. (There is no reality except in action.)

He loves me, he doesn't love my bowels, if they showed him my appendix in a glass he wouldn't recognize it, he's always feeling me, but if they put the glass in his hands he wouldn't touch it, he wouldn't think, "that's hers," you ought to love all of somebody, the esophagus, the liver, the intestines. Maybe we don't love them because we aren't used to them, but if we saw them the way we saw our hands and arms maybe we'd love them; the starfish must love each other better than we do.

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

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

The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.

When the rich [and politically powerful] make war, it's the poor [and politically weak] who die.

I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.

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

My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think… and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.

[M]an is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, in other respect is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. The Existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never agree that a sweeping passion is a ravaging torrent which fatally leads a man to certain acts and is therefore an excuse. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion.

The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusions … and without resignation either. He stares at death with passionate attention and this fascination liberates him. He experiences the “divine irresponsibility” of the condemned man.

Several hours or several years make no difference once you have lost eternity.

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.

I do not think therefore I am a moustache

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.

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

I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.

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

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

Every human endeavor, however singular it seems, involves the whole human race.

Man must be invented each day

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.

He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else's nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon.

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.

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

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

I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.

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.

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

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.