Jean Paul Sartre Quotes

He was free, free for everything, free to act like an animal or like a machine. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

We are in hell, my dear, there is never a mistake and people are not damned for nothing. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

To eat is to appropriate by destruction. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

It is the reflection of my face. Often in these lost days I study it: I can understand nothing of this face. The faces of others have some sense, some direction. Not mine. I cannot even decide whether it is handsome or ugly. I think it is ugly because I have been told so. But it doesn't strike me. At heart, I am even shocked that anyone can attribute qualities of this kind to it, as if you called a clod of earth or a block of stone beautiful or ugly. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

This is the basis for the joy of love when there is joy; we feel that our existence is justified. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Little flashes of sun on the surface of a cold, dark sea. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in ... but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Love or hatred calls for self-surrender. He cuts a fine figure, the warm-blooded, prosperous man, solidly entrenched in his well-being, who one fine day surrenders all to love - or to hatred; himself, his house, his land, his memories. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Where shall I keep mine? You don't put your past in your pocket; you have to have a house. I have only my body: a man entirely alone, with his lonely body, cannot indulge in memories; they pass through him. I shouldn't complain: all I wanted was to be free. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

She believed in nothing, if it wasn't for her skepticism she would be an athiest. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Could hell be described as too much of anything without a break? Are variety,
moderation and balance instruments we use to keep us from boiling in any inferno of
excess,' whether it be cheesecake or ravenous sex? ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I looked anxiously around me: the present, nothing but the present. Furniture light and solid, rooted in its present, a table, a bed, a closet with a mirror-and me. the true nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, and all that was not present did not exist. The past did not exist. Not at all. Not in things, not even in my thoughts. It is true that I had realized a long time ago that mine had escaped me. But until then I had believed that it had simply gone out of my range. For me the past was only a pensioning off: it was another way of existing, a state of vacation and inaction; each event, when it had played its part, put itself politely into a box and became an honorary event: we have so much difficulty imagining nothingness. Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be-and behind them ... there is nothing. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating. ~ 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

And just what is Antoine Roquentin? An abstraction. A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness. Antoine Roquentin . . . and suddenly the "I" pales, pales, and fades out. Lucid, ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

With older people, it's quite different. They're reliable, they show you what to do, and there's solidity in their affection. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

She is wearing her black dress. She isn't crying, but she never did cry, anyhow. It's a bright sunny day and she's like a black shadow creeping down the empty street. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

The only difference between image and idea is thus that in the one case, the expression of the object is confused, and in the other, it is clear. The confusion comes from this: every movement envelops in itself the infinity of the movements of the universe; and the brain receives an infinity of modifications to which only a confused thought can correspond, enveloping the infinity of clear ideas that would correspond to each detail. Clear ideas are therefore contained in the confused ideas. They are unconscious; they are perceived without being apperceived. Only their sum total is apperceived; this appears simple to us because of our ignorance of its components. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Man lives in the midst of images. Literature offers him a critical image of himself. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, "Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you." What ~ Eula Biss

From these few observations we can already conclude that the real is never beautiful. Beauty is a value applicable only to the imaginary and which means the negation of the world in its essential structure. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

The only being which can be called free is the being which nihilates its being. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

A kiss without a moustache, they said then, is like an egg without salt; I will add to it: and it is like Good without Evil. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean Paul Sartre says in "No Exit" that hell is other people. Well, our task in life is to make it heaven. Or at least earth. ~ Alan Alda

I do not cease to experience my being-for-others; my possibilities do not cease to "die", nor do the distances cease to unfold toward me in terms of the stairway where somebody "could" be, in terms of this dark corner where a human presence "could" hide. Better yet, if I tremble at the slightest noise, if each creak announces to me a look, this is because I am already in the state of being-looked-at. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I enjoy feeling fastidious and aloof. I enjoy saying no, always no, and I should be afraid of any attempt to construct a finally habitable world, because I should merely have to say - Yes; and act like other people. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I am not quite sure of being a man: I never found it very difficult. It seemed to me that you had only to let yourself alone. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

The humanist philosopher who bends over his brothers like an elder brother who is conscious of his responsibilities; the humanist who loves men as they are, the one who loves them as they ought to be, the one who wants to save them with their consent, and the one who will save them in spite of themselves, the one who wants to create myths, and the one who is satisfied with the old myths, the one who loves man for his death, the one who loves man for his life, the happy humanist who always knows what to say to make people laugh, the gloomy humanist whom you usually meet at wakes. They all hate one another : as individuals, of course, not as men. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.
But you have to choose: live or tell. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I exist. It's sweet, so sweet, so slow. And light: you'd think it floated all by itself. It stirs. It brushes by me, melts and vanishes. Gently, gently. There is bubbling water in my throat, it caresses me- and now it comes up again into my mouth. For ever I shall have a little pool of whitish water in my mouth - lying low - grazing my tongue. And this pool is still me. And the tongue. And the throat is me. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

The appearance of the other in the world corresponds therefore to a congealed sliding of the whole universe. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

A few seconds more and the Negress will sing. It seems inevitable, so strong is the necessity of this music: nothing can interrupt it, nothing which comes from this time in which the world has fallen; it will stop by itself, as if by order. If I love this beautiful voice it is especially because of that: it is neither for its fulness nor its sadness, rather because it is the event for which so many notes have been preparing, from so far away, dying that it might be born. And yet I am troubled; it would take so little to make the record stop: a broken spring, the whim of Cousin Adolphe. How strange it is, how moving, that this hardness should be so fragile. Nothing can interrupt it yet it can break it.
The last chord has died away. In the brief silence which follows I feel strongly that there is, that SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED.
Silence.
SOME OF THESE DAYS
YOU'LL MISS ME HONEY ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Every word has consequences. Every silence, too. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I don't know where to go, I stay planted in front of the cardboard chef. I don't need to turn around to know they are watching me through the windows: they are watching my back with surprise and disgust; they thought I was like them, that I was a man, and I deceived them. I suddenly lost the appearance of a man and they saw a crab running backwards out of this human room. Now the unmasked intruder has fled: the show goes on. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Jupiter: I am not your king, impudent larva? Who then has created you?
Orestes: You. But you should not have created me free. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

God is dead. Let us not understand by this that he does not exist or even that he no longer exists. He is dead. He spoke to us and is silent. We no longer have anything but his cadaver. Perhaps he
slipped out of the world, somewhere else like the soul of a dead man. Perhaps he was only a dream ... God is dead. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

No doctrine is more optimistic [than existentialism], since it declares that man's destiny lies within himself. ~ 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

The world would get along very well without literature. It would get along even better without man. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else's nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

The [Communist] Party has one objective: the creation of a socialist economy; and one means: the utilization of the class struggle. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Well, you're free without wanting to be,' he explained, 'it just happens so, that's all. But Mathieu's freedom is based on reason.'
'I still don't understand,' said Lola, shaking her head.
'Well, he doesn't care a curse about his apartment: he lives there just as he would live anywhere else, and I've got the feeling that he doesn't care much about his girl. He stays with her because he must sleep with someone. His freedom isn't visible, it's inside him. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light. ~ 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 want to leave, go to some place where I will be really in my own niche, where I will fit in. . . . But my place is nowhere; I am unwanted, de trop. The ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of form a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

When the rich wage war it's the poor who die. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I can't honestly say where the inspiration for my work came from. I think it came from reading. It came from texts, from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, it came from, you know, Jean-Paul Sartre. These are the ideas that got me worked up and inspired. It wasn't so much the visual things that inspired me. Although, of course, there were plenty of painters in history that I admired all the way from Brueghel to Goya, to Picasso - because everything visual stimulates me. ~ Lebbeus Woods

Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face. Or perhaps it is because I am a single man? People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked? You might say
yes, you might say, nature without humanity. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Black, like the circle, did not exist. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

From time to time I yawn so widely that tears roll down my cheek. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I haven't had any adventures. Things have happened to me, events, incidents, anything you like. But not adventures. It isn't a matter of words; I am beginning to understand. There is something I longed for more than all the rest - without realizing it properly. It wasn't love, heaven forbid, nor glory, nor wealth. It was…anyway, I had imagined that at certain moments my life could take on a rare and precious quality. There was no need for extraordinary circumstances: all I asked for was a little order. There is nothing very splendid about my life at present: but now and then, for example when they played music in the cafés, I would l look back and say to myself: in the old days, in London, Meknés, Tokyo, I have known wonderful moments, I have had adventures. It is that which has been taken away from me now. I have just learnt, all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, that I have been lying to myself for ten years. Adventures are in books. And naturally, everything they tell you about in books can happen in real life, but not in the same way. It was to this way of happening that I attached so much importance. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I sank down on the bench, stupefied, stunned by this profusion of beings without origin: everywhere blossomings, hatchings out, my ears buzzed with existence, my very flesh throbbed and opened, abandoned itself to the universal burgeoning. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

It would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns
...
It goes, it goes ... and there's no end to it. It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterward. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Freedom is what we do with what is done to us. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

For the artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is enchanted with it. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

There are two ways to go to the gas chamber, free and not free. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Movements never quite exist, they are passages, intermediaries between two existences, moments of weakness, I expected to see them come out of nothingness, progressively ripen, blossom: I was finally going to surprise beings in the process of being born. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I shall have to get used all over again to speaking to people without touching them. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Violence is good for those who have nothing to lose. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

We do not wish to say only that a man is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for that of all men. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

When I can't see myself in the mirror, I can't even feel myself, and I begin to wonder if I exist at all. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

So you realized that there were always women in tears, or a red-headed man, or something else to spoil your effects?"

"Yes, naturally. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

When she was in Djibouti and I was in Aden, and I used to go and see her for twenty-four hours, she managed to multiply the misunderstandings between us until there were exactly sixty minutes before I had to leave; sixty minutes, just long enough to make you feel the seconds passing one by one. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Undoubtedly, on his death bed, at
that moment when, ever since Socrates, it has been proper to pronounce certain elevated words, he told
his wife, as one of my uncles told his, who
had watched beside him for twelve nights, I do not thank you, Therese; you have only done your
duty. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I clung to nothing, in a way I was calm. But it was a horrible calm - because of my body; my body, I saw with its eyes, I heard with its ears, but it was no longer me; it sweated and trembled by itself and I didn't recognize it any more. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Freedom only gives you something to be sorry for. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

We are possessed by the things we possess. When I like an object, I always give it to someone. It isn't generosity-it's only because I want others to be enslaved by objects, not me. ~ 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

A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

T. S. Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre, dissimilar enough as thinkers, both tend to undervalue prose and to deny it any imaginative function. Poetry is the creation of linguistic quasi-things; prose is for explanation and exposition, it is essentially didactic, documentary, informative. Prose is ideally transparent; it is only faute de mieux written in words. The influential modern stylist is Hemingway. It would be almost inconceivable now to write like Landor. Most modern English novels indeed are not written. One feels they could slip into some other medium without much loss. It takes a foreigner like Nabokov or an Irishman like Beckett to animate prose language into an imaginative stuff in its own right. ~ Iris Murdoch

A man rarely feels like laughing alone. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

With despair, true optimism begins: the optimism of the man who expects nothing, who knows he has no rights and nothing coming to him, who rejoices in counting on himself alone and in acting alone for the good of all. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Naturally, in the course of my life I have made lots of mistakes, large and small, for one reason or another, but at the heart of it all, every time I made a mistake it was because I was not radical enough. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

The diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted,
leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder - naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness. I kept myself from making the slightest movement, but I didn't need to move in order to ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Because we can imagine, we are free. ~ 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

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

Every belief is a belief that falls short; one never wholly believes what one believes. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

If you begin by saying, 'Thou shalt not lie,' there is no longer any possibility of political action. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

A writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

He raised himself on his hands and looked at Irene's face: the nudity of that feminine body had risen into her face, the body had reabsorbed it, as nature reabsorbs forsaken gardens. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

So I was a poodle of the future; I made prophecies. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

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

Something I didn't know any more: a sort of joy. The ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Höderer: You don't love men, Hugo. You love only principles.
Hugo: Men? Why should I love them? Do they love me?
Höderer: Then why did you come to us? If you don't love men, you can't fight for them.
Hugo: I joined the party because its cause is just, and I shall leave it when that cause ceases to be just. As for men, it's not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
Höderer: And I, I love them for what they are. With all their filth and and all their vices. I love their voices and their warm grasping hands, and their skin, the nudest skin of all, and their uneasy glances, and the desperate struggle each has to pursue against anguish and against death. For me, one man more or less in the world is something that counts. It's something precious. You, I know you now, you are a destroyer. You detest men because you detest yourself. Your purity resembles death. 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

We will freedom for freedom's sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Man is condemned to be free; ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I dreamed vaguely of killing myself to wipe out at least one of these superfluous lives. But even my death would have been In the way. In the way, my corpse, my blood on these stones, between these plants, at the back of this smiling garden. And the decomposed flesh would have been In the way in the earth which would receive my bones, at last, cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth, it would have been In the way: I was In the way for eternity. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Our job as a writer is to represent the world and to bear witness to it. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre