Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

305 Sourced Quotes

Aegistheus, the kings have another secret.... Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the Gods can do nothing against that man. It is a matter for men to handle amongst themselves, and it is up to other men — and to them alone — to let him flee or to destroy him.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I grasp at each second, trying to suck it dry: nothing happens which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever in myself, nothing, neither the fugitive tenderness of those lovely eyes, nor the noises of the street, nor the false dawn of early morning: and even so the minute passes and I do not hold it back, I like to see it pass.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Blood doubly unites us, for we share the same blood and we have spilled blood.

Jean-Paul Sartre
In the state I was in, if someone had come and told me I could go home quietly, that they would leave me my life whole, it would have left me cold: several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I've dropped out of their hearts like a little sparrow fallen from its nest. So gather me up, dear, fold me to your heart – and you'll see how nice I can be.

Jean-Paul Sartre
This inner revolution is realistic because it maintains itself deliberately within the framework of existing institutions; the oppressed reckon with the real situation.

Jean-Paul Sartre
That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

Jean-Paul Sartre
The revolution you dream of is not ours. You don't want to change the world; you want to blow it up.

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
I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

Jean-Paul Sartre
For those who want 'to change life, 'to reinvent love,' God is nothing but a hindrance.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Admit it, it is your youth that you regret, more even than your crime; it is my youth you hate, even more than my innocence.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Similarly, individual acts of aristocratic generosity do not eliminate pauperism; they perpetuate it.
For man holds his ground only by surpassing himself, in the same sense in which it is said that one ceases to love if one does not love increasingly everyday.

Jean-Paul Sartre
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.

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

Jean-Paul Sartre
I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.

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

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

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
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
Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins.

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
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
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