Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

305 Sourced Quotes

As for the square at Meknes, where I used to go every day, it's even simpler: I do not see it at all anymore. All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words that are indivisibly bound together: a charming square at Meknes. … I don't see anything any more: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.

Jean-Paul Sartre
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
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
Yes, I am so free. And what a superb absence is my soul.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.

Jean-Paul Sartre
To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.

Jean-Paul Sartre
He chooses the most feared, most hated man in order to worship him as a god, feeling sure that he is alone in perceiving the god's secret virtues.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its 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
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
A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing.

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

Jean-Paul Sartre