Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

Life begins on the other side of despair.

Words are loaded pistols.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

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.

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.

In love, one and one are one.

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.

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

Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.

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.

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

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

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

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

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.

The individual's duty is to do what he wants to do, to think whatever he likes, to be accountable to no one but himself, to challenge every idea and every person.

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

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.

Once freedom lights its beacon in man's heart, the gods are powerless against him.

If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically.

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

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.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

Life is a useless passion.

It is only in our decisions that we are important.

Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

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.

Commitment is an act, not a word.

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

God is absence. God is the solitude of man.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.

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

The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose, not his individuality, but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him.

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