Jean-Paul Sartre - Being and Nothingness (1943)

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Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away.... To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Existence precedes and rules essence.

Jean-Paul Sartre
It is not a matter of indifference whether we like oysters or clams, snails or shrimp, if only we know how to unravel the existential significance of these foods.

Jean-Paul Sartre
I am responsible for everything … except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being. Therefore everything takes place as if I were compelled to be responsible. I am abandoned in the world … in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.

Jean-Paul Sartre
The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure nihilation of the In-itself; it is like a hole of being at the heart of Being.

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
All human activities are equivalent … and … all are on principle doomed to failure.

Jean-Paul Sartre
All human actions are equivalent... and... all are on principle doomed to failure.

Jean-Paul Sartre
It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.
Variant translation: It is certain that we can not overcome anguish, for we are anguish.

Jean-Paul Sartre
In order to make myself recognized by the Other, I must risk my own life. To risk one's life, in fact, is to reveal oneself as not-bound to the objective form or to any determined existence — as not-bound to life.

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
The appearance of the other in the world corresponds therefore to a congealed sliding of the whole universe.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Life has no meaning a priori … It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Generally speaking there is no irreducible taste or inclination. They all represent a certain appropriative choice of being. It is up to existential psychoanalysis to compare and classify them. Ontology abandons us here; it has merely enabled us to determine the ultimate ends of human reality, its fundamental possibilities, and the value which haunts it.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Each human reality is at the same time a direct project to metamorphose its own For-itself into an In-itself-For-itself, a project of the appropriation of the world as a totality of being-in-itself, in the form of a fundamental quality. Every human reality is a passion in that it projects losing itself so as to found being and by the same stroke to constitute the In-itself which escapes contingency by being its own foundation, the Ens causa sui, which religions call God. Thus the passion of man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man loses himself as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion.

Jean-Paul Sartre