Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

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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
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
They made me take cod liver oil: that is the height of luxury: a medicine to make you hungry while the others, in the street, would have sold themselves for a beefsteak. I saw them passing my window with their signs: Give me bread.

Jean-Paul Sartre
What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.

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

Jean-Paul Sartre
What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?

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
I know nothing, I am neither woman nor girl; I have been living in a dream and when someone kissed me, it made me want to laugh. Now I am here before you, it seems as though I have just awakened and it is morning.

Jean-Paul Sartre
It is the good children, Madame, who make the most terrible revolutionaries. They say nothing, they do not hide under the table, they eat only one sweet at a time, but later on, they make Society pay dearly for it!

Jean-Paul Sartre
Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound and secret delirium of nature — could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it.

Jean-Paul Sartre