Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

305 Sourced Quotes

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
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
In a world, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.

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

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

Jean-Paul Sartre
God is the solitude of men. There was only me: I alone decided to commit Evil; alone, I invented Good. I am the one who cheated, I am the one who performed miracles, I am the one accusing myself today, I alone can absolve myself; me, the man.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I am a man, Jupiter, and each man must invent his own path.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them... there is nothing.

Jean-Paul Sartre
You have stolen my face from me: you know it and I no longer do.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I grow warm, I begin to feel happy. There is nothing extraordinary in this, it is a small happiness of Nausea: it spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of out time - the time of purple suspenders, and broken chair seats; it is made of white, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain. No sooner than born, it is already old, it seems as though I have known it for twenty years.

Jean-Paul Sartre
You are a tiny little girl, Electra. Other little girls dreamed of being the richest or the most beautiful women of all. And you, fascinated by the horrid destiny of your people, you wished to become the most pained and the most criminal … At your age, children still play with dolls and they play hopscotch. You, poor child, without toys or playmates, you played murder, because it is a game that one can play alone.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Everything is both a trap and a display; the secret reality of the object is what the Other makes of it.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Some men are born committed to action: they do not have a choice, they have been thrown on a path, at the end of that path, an act awaits them, their act.

Jean-Paul Sartre
All-powerful god, who am I but the fear that I inspire in others?

Jean-Paul Sartre
It is the same: a chosen one is a man whom God's finger crushes against the wall.

Jean-Paul Sartre
We do not do what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are —that is the fact.

Jean-Paul Sartre
That is precisely what we should have expected, since Genet wants to live simultaneously creation, destruction, the impossibility of destroying and the impossibility of creating, since he wants both to show his rejection of the divine creation and to manifest, in the absolute, human impotence as man's reproval of God and as the testimony of his grandeur.

Jean-Paul Sartre
There is a universe behind and before him. And the day is approaching when closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left; he will say to himself, "now what?

Jean-Paul Sartre
As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Her face seems ravaged by both lightning and hail. But on yours there is something like the promise of a storm: one day passion will burn it to the bone.

Jean-Paul Sartre
If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Criminals together. We're in hell, my little friend, and there's never any mistake there. People are not damned for nothing.

Jean-Paul Sartre
The homosexual never thinks of himself when someone is branded in his presence with the name homosexual.... His sexual tastes will doubtless lead him to enter into relationships with this suspect category, but he would like to make use of them without being likened to them. Here, too, the ban that is cast on certain men by society has destroyed all possibility of reciprocity among them. Shame isolates.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.

Jean-Paul Sartre
His obedience is real since he really and truly fulfills his mission, since he runs real risks in order to carry out the beloved's orders. But, on the other hand, it is imaginary because he submits only to a creature of his mind.

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 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