Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

305 Sourced Quotes

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.

Jean-Paul Sartre
You see, I divide men into three categories: those who have a lot of money, those who have none at all and those who have a little. The first want to keep what they have: their interest is to maintain order; the second want to take what they do not have: their interest is to destroy the existing order and to establish one which is profitable to them. They each are realist, people with whom one can agree. The third group want to overthrow the social order to take what they do not have, while still preserving it so that no one takes away what they have. Thus, they preserve in fact what they destroy in theory, or they destroy in fact what they seem to preserve. Those are the idealists.

Jean-Paul Sartre
The worst of misfortunes is still a stroke of luck, since one feels oneself living when one experiences it/

Jean-Paul Sartre
Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the of it is nothing other than the sense you choose.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Refusing the Nobel Prize:
A writer must refuse, therefore, to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.

Jean-Paul Sartre
With despair, true optimism begins: the optimism of the man who expects nothing, who knows he has no rights and nothing coming to him, who rejoices in counting on himself alone and in acting alone for the good of all.

Jean-Paul Sartre
In any case, if you ever leave me with a handsome man, do not tell me that you trust me because, let me warn you: that is not what will prevent me from deceiving you, if I want to. On the contrary.

Jean-Paul Sartre
My eyes feel all soft, all soft as flesh. I'm going to sleep.

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

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

Jean-Paul Sartre
Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not. He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to recover his inner being.

Jean-Paul Sartre
What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal…. For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Remember, Orestes: you were part of my herd, you grazed in the fields along with my sheep. Your liberty is nothing but a mange eating away at you, it is nothing but an exile.

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 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
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Lord, you have cursed Cain and Cain's children: thy will be done. You have allowed men's hearts to be corrupted, that their intentions be rotten, that their actions putrefy and stink: thy will be done.

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
The world is sacred because it gives an inkling of a meaning that escapes us
…for one cannot enter an image unless one makes oneself imaginary

Jean-Paul Sartre
It is freedom, it is particularity, it is solitude that we are aiming at, and not Evil for its own sake

Jean-Paul Sartre
Man, being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and himself as a way of being.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.

Jean-Paul Sartre