Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

305 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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
But, if it will help ease your irritated souls, please know, dearly departed, that you have ruined our lives.

Jean-Paul Sartre
You know how much I admire Che Guevara. In fact, I believe that the man was not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age: as a fighter and as a man, as a theoretician who was able to further the cause of revolution by drawing his theories from his personal experience in battle.

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

Jean-Paul Sartre
Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

Jean-Paul Sartre
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.

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
Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

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

Jean-Paul Sartre
You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.

Jean-Paul Sartre
So that's what Hell is: I'd never have believed it…Do you remember, brimstone, the stake, the gridiron?…What a joke! No need of a gridiron, Hell is other people.

Jean-Paul Sartre