Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

305 Sourced Quotes

The dreamer must contaminate the others by his dream, he must make them fall into it

Jean-Paul Sartre
I felt less alone when I didn't know you yet: I was waiting for the other. I thought only of his strength and never of my weakness. And now here you are, Orestes, it was you. I look at you and I see that we are two orphans.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Genet is a man-failure: he wills the impossible in order to derive from the tragic grandeur of this defeat the assurance that there is something other than the possible.

Jean-Paul Sartre
If we must absolutely mention this state of affairs, I suggest that we call ourselves absent, that is more proper.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Your entire universe will not be enough to make me guilty. You are the king of the Gods, Jupiter, the king of the stones and of the stars, the king of the waves of the sea. But you are not the king of men.

Jean-Paul Sartre
So it comes to this; one doesn't need rest. Why bother about sleep if one isn't sleepy? That stands to reason, doesn't it? Wait a minute, there's a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why, now, should it be disagreeable? …Ah, I see; it's life without a break.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I entered the [Communist] Party because its cause was just and I will leave it when it ceases to be just.

Jean-Paul Sartre
What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I am responsible for everything … except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being. Therefore everything takes place as if I were compelled to be responsible. I am abandoned in the world … in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.

Jean-Paul Sartre
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.

Jean-Paul Sartre
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

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

Jean-Paul Sartre
Perception is naturally surpassed toward action; better yet, it can be revealed only in and through projects of action. The world is revealed as an "always future hollow", for we are always future to ourselves.

Jean-Paul Sartre
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.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I have always been happy. Even if I had been more honest with regard to myself at that moment I should still have written La Nausee.

Jean-Paul Sartre
When we want something, we always have to reckon with probabilities.

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

Jean-Paul Sartre
This is the basis for the joy of love when there is joy; we feel that our existence is justified.

Jean-Paul Sartre
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.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.

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

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

Jean-Paul Sartre
I have such a desire to sleep and am so much behind my sleep. A good night, one good night and all this nonsense will be swept away.

Jean-Paul Sartre
There are two ways of destroying a people. Either condemn them en bloc or force them to repudiate the leaders they adopted. The second is the worse.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I
am still choosing.

Jean-Paul Sartre
All views are only probable, and a doctrine of probability which is not bound to a truth dissolves into thin air. In order to describe the probable, you must have a firm hold on the true. Therefore, before there can by any truth whatsoever, there must be absolute truth.

Jean-Paul Sartre
In the nineteenth century one had to give all sorts of guarantees and lead an exemplary life in order to cleanse oneself in the eyes of the bourgeois of the sin of writing, for literature is, in essence, heresy. The situation has not changed except that it is now the Communists, that is, the qualified representatives of the proletariat, who as a matter of principle regard the writer as suspect.

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

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

Jean-Paul Sartre