Jean Paul Sartre Quotes

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321 Thought-Provoking Quotes on Individuality, Existence, and Life

“A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness… and suddenly the “I” pales, pales, and fades out.”

“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 afterwards.”

“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.”

“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.”

“People. You must love people. Men are admirable. I want
to vomit—and suddenly, there it is: the Nausea”

“I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.”

“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.”

“It is disgusting -- Why must we have bodies?”

“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.”

“I am not asking for sensational revelations, but I would like to sense the meaning of that minute, to feel it's urgency…”

“That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst.”

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

“I wanted for the moments in my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. It would be just as well to try to catch time by the tail.”

“It is the good children, Madame, who make the most terrible revolutionaries. They say nothing, they do not hide under the table, they eat only one sweet at a time, but later on, they make Society pay dearly for it!”

“For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.”

“We must act out passion before we can feel it.”

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

“Time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.”

“I have no religion, but if I were to choose one, it would be that of Shariati's.”

“[W]e only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.”

“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.”

“it was odd, he thought, that a man could hate himself as though he were someone else.”

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

“… I had spent my time counterfeiting eternity…”

“Genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out.”

“Your scare me rather. My reflection in the glass never did that; of course, I knew it so well. Like something I had tamed… I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.”

“A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing.”

“There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.”

“In doing Good, I lose myself in Being, I abandon my particularity, I become a universal subject.”

“Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.”

“Some men are born committed to action: they do not have a choice, they have been thrown on a path, at the end of that path, an act awaits them, their act.”

“I mistrust illuminations: what we take for a discovery is very often only a familiar thought that we have not recognized.”

“I will take it all: tongs, molten lead, prongs, garrotes, all that burns, all that tears, I want to truly suffer. Better one hundred bites, better the whip, vitriol, than this suffering in the head, this ghost of suffering which grazes and caresses and never hurts enough.”

“Jupiter: I committed the first crime by creating men as mortals. After that, what more could you do, you the murderers?
Aegisteus: Come on; they already had death in them: at most you simply hastened things a little.”

“His business is here, it is here that he is despised and vilified, it is here that he must carry out his undertaking”

“We are in hell and I will have my turn!”

“Your entire universe will not be enough to make me guilty. You are the king of the Gods, Jupiter, the king of the stones and of the stars, the king of the waves of the sea. But you are not the king of men.”

“Since he is unable to be the beloved, he will become the lover.”

“But since he has decided to have the impossibility of living, every misfortune is an opportunity which lays this importance of living before his eyes and obliges him to decide, once again, to die.”

“I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good.”

“It was a constraint; he makes of it his mission”

“It is not the same thing. You are perhaps not lying, but you are not telling the truth.”

“…and if you are common, you can dress up as a woman, show you behind or write poems: there’s nothing offensive about a naked behind if it’s everybody’s; each person will be mirrored in it.”

“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.”

“One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.”

“As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.”

“The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free, Aegistheus. You know it and they do not.”

“This is the contradiction of racism, colonialism, and all forms of tyranny: in order to treat a man like a dog, one must first recognize him as a man.”

“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.”