Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

305 Sourced Quotes

I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.

Jean-Paul Sartre
If I relegate impossible Salvation to the prop-room, what remains? A whole man, composed of all men and as good as all of them and no better than any.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Monsieur … I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Outside nature, against nature, without excuse, beyond remedy, except what remedy I find within myself.

Jean-Paul Sartre
This is the contradiction of racism, colonialism, and all forms of tyranny: in order to treat a man like a dog, one must first recognize him as a man.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.

Jean-Paul Sartre
But since he has decided to have the impossibility of living, every misfortune is an opportunity which lays this importance of living before his eyes and obliges him to decide, once again, to die.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Never have I thought that I was the happy possessor of a "talent"; my sole concern has been to save myself by work and faith.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I distrust the incommunicable: it is the source of all violence.

Jean-Paul Sartre
When the rich make war, it's the poor that die.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I, for my part, do not conceive an act as having causes, and I consider myself satisfied when I have found in it not its 'factors' but the general themes which it organizes: for our decisions gather into new syntheses and on new occasions the leitmotif that governs our life

Jean-Paul Sartre
It is for the sake of order that I seduced Clytemnestra, for the sake of order that I killed my king. I wanted for order to rule and that it rule through me. I have lived without desire, without love, without hope: I made order. Oh! terrible and divine passion!

Jean-Paul Sartre
So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: Hell is other people.

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
I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything.

Jean-Paul Sartre
One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I came to claim my kingdom and you refused me because I was not one of you. Now I am one of you, my subjects, we are bound by blood, and I deserve to be your king. Your sins and your remorse, your mighty anguish, I take all upon myself. Fear your dead no more, they are my dead.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Esse est percipi, and he recognizes himself as being only insofar as he is perceived.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I hate victims who respect their executioners.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Your church is a whore: she sells her favors to the rich.

Jean-Paul Sartre
…the reality of society involves the socialization of certain unrealities.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I am not asking for sensational revelations, but I would like to sense the meaning of that minute, to feel it's urgency...

Jean-Paul Sartre
Human life begins on the far side of despair.

Jean-Paul Sartre