Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

305 Sourced Quotes

Each human reality is at the same time a direct project to metamorphose its own For-itself into an In-itself-For-itself, a project of the appropriation of the world as a totality of being-in-itself, in the form of a fundamental quality. Every human reality is a passion in that it projects losing itself so as to found being and by the same stroke to constitute the In-itself which escapes contingency by being its own foundation, the Ens causa sui, which religions call God. Thus the passion of man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man loses himself as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion.

Jean-Paul Sartre
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.

Jean-Paul Sartre
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.

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
Karsky: I met your father last week. Are you still interested in hearing how he is doing?
Hugo: No.
Karsky: It is very probable that you will be responsible for his death.
Hugo: It is virtually certain that he is responsible for my life. We are even.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse.

Jean-Paul Sartre
There is a universe behind and before him. And the day is approaching when closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left; he will say to himself, "now what?

Jean-Paul Sartre
Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.

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
I hate victims who respect their executioners.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Since he is unable to be the beloved, he will become the lover.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Esse est percipi, and he recognizes himself as being only insofar as he is perceived.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I maintain that inversion is the effect of neither a prenatal choice nor an endocrinal malformation nor even the passive and determined result of complexes. It is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Her face seems ravaged by both lightning and hail. But on yours there is something like the promise of a storm: one day passion will burn it to the bone.

Jean-Paul Sartre
…and if you are common, you can dress up as a woman, show you behind or write poems: there's nothing offensive about a naked behind if it's everybody's; each person will be mirrored in it.

Jean-Paul Sartre
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.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it. I know I'll never jump again.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?

Jean-Paul Sartre
Suppose that I wish to deserve the title of robber of remorse and that I place in myself all [the townspeople's] repentence?

Jean-Paul Sartre
Catherine: Why commit Evil?
Goetz: Because Good has already been done.
Catherine: Who has done it?
Goetz: God the Father. I, on the other hand, am improvising.

Jean-Paul Sartre
The [Communist] Party has one objective: the creation of a socialist economy; and one means: the utilization of the class struggle.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Ah! How I hate the crimes of the new generation: they are dry and sterile as darnel.

Jean-Paul Sartre
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.

Jean-Paul Sartre
If only one man should hate another, it would be sufficient for hatred to spread from one to another and overwhelm mankind.

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

Jean-Paul Sartre