Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

“Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“She smiled and said with an ecstatic air: "It shines like a little diamond",
"What does?"
"This moment. It is round, it hangs in empty space like a little diamond; I am eternal.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

You and me are real people, operating in a real world. We are not figments of each other's imagination. I am the architect of my own self, my own character and destiny. It is no use whingeing about what I might have been, I am the things I have done and nothing more. We are all free, completely free. We can each do any damn thing we want. Which is more than most of us dare to imagine.

— 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

“I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“It is disgusting
Why must we have bodies?”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

A madman's ravings are absurd in relation to the situation in which he finds himself, but not in relation to his madness.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.

— 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 Nausea has stayed down there, in the yellow light. I am happy: this cold is so pure, this night so pure: am I myself not a wave of icy air? With neither blood, nor lymph, nor flesh. Flowing down this long canal towards the pallor down there. To be nothing but coldness.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“Much more likely you'll hurt me. Still what does it matter? If I've got to suffer, it may as well be at your hands, your pretty hands.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

I see the insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“But you looked much more like a fellow who had just realised that he has been living on ideas that don't pay.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it any more. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“I go, I go away, I walk, I wander, and everywhere I go I bear my shell with me, I remain at home in my room, among my books, I do not approach an inch nearer to Marrakech or Timbuktu. Even if I took a train, a boat, or a motor-bus, if I went to Morocco for my holiday, if I suddenly arrived at Marrakech, I should be always in my room, at home. And if I walked in the squares and in the sooks, if I gripped an Arab's shoulder, to feel Marrakech in his person - well, that Arab would be at Marrakech, not I : I should still be seated in my room, placid and meditative as is my chosen life, two thousand miles away from the Moroccan and his burnoose. In my room. Forever.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Never were we freer than under the German Occupation.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

I found everything perfectly clear, and I really understood absolutely nothing.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

All of us abandon ourselves to existence, because we were among
ourselves, only among ourselves, it has taken us unawares, in the disorder, the day to day drift: I am
ashamed for myself and for what exists in front of it.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“I love you enormously. I'm spending a little time away from you-quite absurd and contingent. I would so like to see you, my stubborn little thing, and tell you my stories and hold your hand. You are my love, you good little being. Far from you I measure the nothingness of the flesh, and I am not having much fun.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

For a moment I wondered if I were not going to
love humanity. But, after all, it was their Sunday, not mine.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“She is dearer to me than life. But her suffering comes from within, and only she can rid herself of it. For she is free.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“Man is free rather than man is freedom.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

If you seek authenticity for authenticity's sake you are no longer authentic.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“The vocal chorus will be along shortly: I like that part especially and the abrupt manner in which it throws itself forward, like a cliff against the sea. For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, only notes, a myriad of tiny jolts. They know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them and destroys them without even giving them time to recuperate and exist for themselves. They race, they press forward, they strike me a sharp blow in passing and are obliterated. I would like to hold them back, but I know if I succeeded in stopping one it would remain between my fingers only as a raffish languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even will it. I know few impressions stronger or more harsh.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“Existence is without memory; of the vanished it retains nothing - not even a memory.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“He was free, free for everything, free to act like an animal or like a machine.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“Thirdly, the existent individual is impassioned, impassioned with a passionate thought; he is inspired; he is a kind of incarnation of the infinite in the finite. This passion which animates the existent (and this brings us to the fourth characteristic) is what Kierkegaard calls the passion of freedom.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“There are two ways of destroying a people. Either condemn them en bloc or force them to repudiate the leaders they adopted. The second is the worse.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, just notes, a myriad tiny tremors. The notes know no rest, an inflexibleorder gives birth to them then destroys them, without ever leaving them the chance to recuperate and exist for themselves ... I would like to hole them back, but I know that, if I succeeded in stooping one, there would only remain in may hand a corrupt and languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even want that death: I know of few more bitter or intense impressions.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“In the nineteenth century one had to give all sorts of guarantees and lead an exemplary life in order to cleanse oneself in the eyes of the bourgeois of the sin of writing, for literature is, in essence, heresy. The situation has not changed except that it is now the Communists, that is, the qualified representatives of the proletariat, who as a matter of principle regard the writer as suspect.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

The more absurd life is, the more insupportable death is.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the gods can do nothing against that man.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“Life gave me everything I asked
If all I asked was not a great deal, that's my problem!”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“Either the USSR was not the country of socialism, in which case socialism didn't exist anywhere and doubtless, wasn't possible: or else, socialism was that, this abominable monster, this police state, the power of beasts of prey”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

It is no longer possible to escape men. Farewell to the monsters, farewell to the saints. Farewell to pride. All that is left is men.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“The plight of modern man is that he is condemmed to be free.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“Some of these days, Oh, you'll miss me honey”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“I am myself and I am here.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“Torture is senseless violence, born in fear ... torture costs human lives but does not save them. We would almost be too lucky if these crimes were the work of savages: the truth is that torture makes torturers.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“Everything comes to us from others. To Be is to belong to someone.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“I am a man, Jupiter, and each man must invent his own path.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“Lord, you have cursed Cain and Cain's children: thy will be done. You have allowed men's hearts to be corrupted, that their intentions be rotten, that their actions putrefy and stink: thy will be done.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre