Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.

Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.

Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.

We are our choices.

He who asks a question is a fool for a minute; he who does not remains a fool forever. When you realize that by changing your perspective, big things can be seen as little things, it becomes much harder to worry about anything. Commitment is an act, not a word.

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

Before you come alive, life is nothing; it 's up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose.

What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence.

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. [It is a matter of choice, not chance.] Such is the first principle of existentialism.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.

I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think any more, I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I . . . because . . . ugh!

Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.

We do not judge the people we love.

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.

your judgement judges you and defines you

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.

I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.

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.

the worst part about being lied to is knowing you werent worth the truth

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.

I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together.

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.

Sometimes the truth is too simple for intellectuals.

Man is what he wills himself to be.

Hell is other people at breakfast.

There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

In wanting freedom we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others, and that the freedom of others depends on ours. . . I am obliged to want others to have freedom at the same time that I want my own freedom. I can take freedom as my goal only if I take that of others as a goal as well.

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

He loves me, he doesn't love my bowels, if they showed him my appendix in a glass he wouldn't recognize it, he's always feeling me, but if they put the glass in his hands he wouldn't touch it, he wouldn't think, "that's hers," you ought to love all of somebody, the esophagus, the liver, the intestines. Maybe we don't love them because we aren't used to them, but if we saw them the way we saw our hands and arms maybe we'd love them; the starfish must love each other better than we do.

If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light.

Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.

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.

The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.

It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.

I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.

The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.

Understand me: I wish to be a man from somewhere, a man among men. You see, a slave, when he passes by, weary and surly, carrying a heavy load, limping along and looking down at his feet, only at his feet to avoid falling down; he is in his town, like a leaf in greenery, like a tree in a forest, argos surrounds him, heavy and warm, full of herself; I want to be that slave, Electra, I want to pull the city around me and to roll myself up in it like a blanket. I will not leave.

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.

When the rich [and politically powerful] make war, it's the poor [and politically weak] who die.