Sartre Existentialism Quotes

We choose our friends on the basis of, among other things, our conception of ourselves. That's not to say that friendship is narcissistic, it doesn't follow that we choose people 'like ourselves'; in fact we might choose people very different than ourselves. For example, if I'm not very intelligent, and I'm concerned about my lack of intelligence, I might take up with an extremely intelligent woman, precisely in order to have her intelligence, in some sense, radiate onto me.

The idea is that in friendship what we do is we pick people who are going to reinforce, in some sense, our own conception of ourselves. So if I think of myself as intelligent, or I want to think of myself as intelligent, whether or not I pick a partner who is also intelligent, what is going to be essential is that it's going to be a partner who somehow expands my notion of my own intelligence, either by telling me all the time, perhaps, how intelligent I am, or maybe by always contradicting me in such a way that I can prove my intelligence with her or him. ~ Robert C. Solomon

The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual. ~ Friedrich Durrenmatt

Man being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being. ~ 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

Nietzsche was not an Existentialist. Existentialism emerged out of the conflict between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, the Danish religious writer. ~ Leo Strauss

Aegistheus, the kings have another secret ... Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the Gods can do nothing against that man. It is a matter for men to handle amongst themselves, and it is up to other men and to them alone to let him flee or to destroy him. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

We can live without technology, but not without people. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Certainly truths are to be found in all the philosophers, and above all half-truths, but these truths are flanked with errors and inconsistencies, and there is moreover no need for them; hence it is pointless to dwell on them. Partial truths are only to be accepted in the domain of traditional orthodoxy, because they are only acceptable in the context of the total Truth, which alone guarantees their exactitude and their efficacy. To think while denying the total Truth, which is both objective and subjective, is completely inconsistent; it is not really thinking.
[Letter on Existentialism to Huston Smith] ~ Frithjof Schuon

But Viv, if I've learned anything at all in the last eight years of my life? It's that people just like to tell themselves stories about where they came from. They can't help themselves. They don't trust the world around them--it's too good for them, or not good enough--so they tell themselves stories about it. They tell themselves an old magician who lives up in the sky made them out of clay and put them here until whenever he makes up his mind to take them out again. Your parents didn't like their creation myth, that's all--it had pain in it, and chaos, and their own parents were ashamed. So they told themselves a story that was at least partially true: about two good people who deserved happy lives. And probably at some point they started to believe that story. But the thing is, really, that it doesn't matter. For your parents or anyone else. It doesn't actually matter where we came from, or where we're going, or when. The only thing that matters is what we have to do while we're here and how well we do it. ~ Katie Coyle

I want to see the world without explaining away its mystery by calling things wicked, righteous, sinful, and good. I want to erase in myself the easy explanations, the always mendacious explanations about why things happen the way they do, and in this way, come to know the mystery of being–-not by any approximation in thought, but by being. I want to be and not be ashamed of being. ~ Therese Doucet

It's like practicing pole vaulting your entire life, and then getting to the olympics and saying, 'what the hell did I want to jump over this stupid bar for? ~ Stephen King

Criticism often takes from the tree caterpillars and blossoms together. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I admire the way we can lie, putting reason on our side. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

One thus arrives at a curious conception of thought. Thought has no real, concrete existence, accessible to immediate consciousness, since the datum of introspection is the image. It has no universality in act, because, if it were so, one should be able to grasp it directly. But it is a potential universality that one derives from the fact that a word can be accompanied by very different images. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I entered the [Communist] Party because its cause was just and I will leave it when it ceases to be just. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable. ~ Albert Camus

Scheming is mediocre. ~ Vipin Behari Goyal

People are what matters and how you treat them determines what kind of a creature you are - a conscientious human being or a mere human-looking animal. ~ Abhijit Naskar

It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths. ~ Rollo May

Life gave me everything I asked
If all I asked was not a great deal, that's my problem! ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Because the Nazi venom worked its way even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest; because an all-powerful police sought to force us into silence every word became as precious as a declaration of principle; because we were persecuted, each of our gestures carried the weight of a commitment. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

This happened not once, but twice - first with Martin Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time, and then with his pupil Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. (We discuss Sartre in the next section.) ~ Christopher Panza

Nevertheless we are free individuals, and this freedom condemns us to make choices throughout our lives. There are no eternal values or norms we can adhere to, which makes our choices even more significant. Because we are totally responsible for everything we do. Sartre emphasized that man must never disclaim the responsibility for his actions. Nor can we avoid the responsibility of making our own choices on the grounds that we "must" go to work, or we "must" live up to certain middle-class expectations regarding how we should live. Those who thus slip into the anonymous masses will never be other than members of the impersonal flock, having fled from themselves into self-deception. On the other hand our freedom obliges us to make something of ourselves, to live "authentically" or "truly". ~ Jostein Gaarder

Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life? ~ Andrew Sean Greer

The only certainty is absurdity. ~ Pugazharasu Anancia Devaneyan

In comparison with capitalism, which reconstituted man as an economic animal; in comparison with Marxism, which found man an object made up of organized matter; in comparison with catholicism, which saw him as the unwitting plaything of an imperious unseen power (the Divine Will); in comparison with dialectical materialism, which saw him as unwitting plaything of the deterministic evolution of the means of production- existentialism made man a god ~ Ali Shariati

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

Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that "hell is other people," which is true enough, but truer still is hell is other people's boyfriends ~ Cheryl Strayed

A teenage boy who liked existentialism? She might as well have said that chocolate was delicious or Freddie Mercury had a nice falsetto or Dickens was wordy. ~ Phuc Tran

Albert Camus's 'La Peste' - 'The Plague' - had an enormous impact on me when I read it in high school French class, and I chose my senior yearbook quote from it. In college, I wrote a philosophy class paper on Camus and Sartre, and again chose my yearbook quote from 'La Peste.' ~ Drew Gilpin Faust

Wouldn't the joys of life lose all colour, if life was eternal? ~ Constantina Maud

Apparently there is no profit in the unique, or not enough to make it worthwhile to preserve. Ultimately it drains the life out of us, and existentialism starts to make more and more sense. ~ Lewis Black

When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship. ~ Rollo May

I wish I could see butterflies burst from cocoons
Without tempering my amazement
Knowing all beauty eventually dies. ~ Justin Wetch

Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I am free: there is absolutely no more reason for living, all the ones I have tried have given way and I can't imagine any more of them. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

French philosopher whom professional philosophers generally accord highest honors is Descartes. Montaigne and Pascal, Voltaire and Rousseau, Bergson and Sartre do not enjoy their greatest vogue among philosophers, and of these only Rousseau has had any considerable influence on the history of philosophy (through Kant and Hegel). ~ Friedrich Nietzsche