Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

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You can see it's the end; Europe is springing leaks everywhere. What then has happened? It simply is that in the past we made history and now it is being made of us. The ratio of forces has been inverted.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Only a neutral, who is indifferent to the stake and perhaps to all stakes, can appreciate aesthetically the grandeur of a fine disaster

Jean-Paul Sartre
Abjection is a methodological conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian epoche: it establishes the world as a closed system which consciousness regards from without, in the manner of divine understanding.

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

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

Jean-Paul Sartre
It is the same: a chosen one is a man whom God's finger crushes against the wall.

Jean-Paul Sartre
That is precisely what we should have expected, since Genet wants to live simultaneously creation, destruction, the impossibility of destroying and the impossibility of creating, since he wants both to show his rejection of the divine creation and to manifest, in the absolute, human impotence as man's reproval of God and as the testimony of his grandeur.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up; I forget them almost immediately.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I, for my part, do not conceive an act as having causes, and I consider myself satisfied when I have found in it not its 'factors' but the general themes which it organizes: for our decisions gather into new syntheses and on new occasions the leitmotif that governs our life

Jean-Paul Sartre
…the impossible must be supposed in order to explain the superdetermination of the event

Jean-Paul Sartre
You are a tiny little girl, Electra. Other little girls dreamed of being the richest or the most beautiful women of all. And you, fascinated by the horrid destiny of your people, you wished to become the most pained and the most criminal … At your age, children still play with dolls and they play hopscotch. You, poor child, without toys or playmates, you played murder, because it is a game that one can play alone.

Jean-Paul Sartre
You have stolen my face from me: you know it and I no longer do.

Jean-Paul Sartre
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.

Jean-Paul Sartre
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.

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
I exist. It's sweet, so sweet, so slow. And light: you'd think it floated all by itself. It stirs. It brushes by me, melts and vanishes. Gently, gently. There is bubbling water in my throat, it caresses me- and now it comes up again into my mouth. For ever I shall have a little pool of whitish water in my mouth - lying low - grazing my tongue. And this pool is still me. And the tongue. And the throat is me.

Jean-Paul Sartre
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.

Jean-Paul Sartre
If only you knew how little I care. Cowardly or not, as long as he is a good kisser.

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

Jean-Paul Sartre