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Jean Paul Sartre Quotes
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321 Thought-Provoking Quotes on Individuality, Existence, and Life

Discover the profound wisdom of Jean Paul Sartre through a collection of thought-provoking quotes. From the importance of individuality and self-determination to the complexities of human existence, delve into the mind of this influential philosopher and explore his unique perspectives on life.

Jean-Paul Sartre was a prominent French philosopher, playwright, novelist, and political activist. He is considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism, known for his work in existentialism. Sartre's philosophy influenced various fields including sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies. Despite declining official honors, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964. Sartre had a significant relationship with feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and together they challenged societal norms and expectations. The conflict between conformity and authenticity was a central theme in his early work.

Born on June 21, 1905 in Paris, Sartre showed an early interest in philosophy and literature. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure where he formed lifelong friendships with influential intellectuals of his time. Sartre's philosophical development was greatly influenced by attending seminars conducted by Alexandre Kojève. Throughout his life, Sartre actively engaged in political activism and social justice causes. He strongly opposed colonization and supported the Algerian War for independence from French rule as well as anti-American involvement in the Vietnam War. As a prolific writer, Sartre produced numerous works including plays such as "No Exit" and "The Flies". In later years, he renounced literature but continued to write about politics and issues of social import. Jean-Paul Sartre passed away on April 15, 1980 in Paris.

✵ 21. June 1905 – 15. April 1980   •   Other names Jean-Paule Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre photo
Jean Paul Sartre: 321   quotes 51   likes

Jean Paul Sartre Quotes

“Blood doubly unites us, for we share the same blood and we have spilled blood.”

Jean Paul Sartre The Flies

Orestes to Electra, Act 2
The Flies (1943)

“The anti‐Semite understands nothing about modern society. He would be incapable of conceiving of a constructive plan; his action cannot reach the level of the methodical; it remains on the ground of passion. To a long‐term enterprise he prefers an explosion of rage analogous to the running amuck of the Malays. His intellectual activity is confined to interpretation; he seeks in historical events the signs of the presence of an evil power. Out of this spring those childish and elaborate fabrications which give him his resemblance to the extreme paranoiacs. In addition, anti‐Semitism channels evolutionary drives toward the destruction of certain men, not of institutions. An anti‐Semitic mob will consider it has done enough when it has massacred some Jews and burned a few synagogues. It represents, therefore, a safety valve for the owning classes, who encourage it and thus substitute for a dangerous hate against their regime a beneficent hate against particular people. Above all this naive dualism is eminently reassuring to he anti‐Semite himself. If all he has to do is to remove Evil, that means that the Good is already given. He has no need to seek it in anguish, to invent it, to scrutinize it patiently when he has found it, to prove it in action, to verify it by its consequences, or, finally, to shoulder he responsibilities of the moral choice be has made. It is not by chance that the great outbursts of anti‐Semitic rage conceal a basic optimism. The anti‐Semite as cast his lot for Evil so as not to have to cast his lot for Good. The more one is absorbed in fighting Evil, he less one is tempted to place the Good in question. One does not need to talk about it, yet it is always understood in the discourse of the anti‐Semite and it remains understood in his thought. When he has fulfilled his mission as holy destroyer, the Lost Paradise will reconstitute itself. For the moment so many tasks confront the anti‐Semite that he does not have time to think about it. He is in the breach, fighting, and each of his outbursts of rage is a pretext to avoid the anguished search for the Good.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Anti-Semite and Jew

Pages 31-32
Anti-Semite and Jew (1945)

Men , Hate , People , Search

“I entered the [Communist] Party because its cause was just and I will leave it when it ceases to be just.”

Jean Paul Sartre Dirty Hands

Hugo to Hoederer, Act 5, sc. 3
Dirty Hands (1948)

“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 No Exit

Estelle, discovering that there are no mirrors in Hell, Act 1, sc. 5
No Exit (1944)

Way , Feeling

“Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position. Its intention is not in the least that of plunging men into despair. And if by despair one means as the Christians do – any attitude of unbelief, the despair of the existentialists is something different. Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God. In this sense existentialism is optimistic. It is a doctrine of action, and it is only by self-deception, by confining their own despair with ours that Christians can describe us as without hope.”

Jean Paul Sartre

Existentialism Is a Humanism, lecture (1946)

Men , God , Hope , Understanding

“Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.”

Jean Paul Sartre book The Devil and the Good Lord

Act 10, sc. 2
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

Night

“Remember, Orestes: you were part of my herd, you grazed in the fields along with my sheep. Your liberty is nothing but a mange eating away at you, it is nothing but an exile.”

Jean Paul Sartre The Flies

Jupiter, Act 3
The Flies (1943)

Parting

“…in order to change poverty into wealth, one must start by displaying it.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

(420).
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

Change , Wealth

“I came to claim my kingdom and you refused me because I was not one of you. Now I am one of you, my subjects, we are bound by blood, and I deserve to be your king. Your sins and your remorse, your mighty anguish, I take all upon myself. Fear your dead no more, they are my dead.”

Jean Paul Sartre The Flies

Orestes, Act 3
The Flies (1943)

Fear , Dead

“Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins.”

Jean Paul Sartre Dirty Hands

Act 5, sc. 3
Dirty Hands (1948)

“A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.”

Jean Paul Sartre The Flies

King Aegistheus, Act 2
The Flies (1943)

“Virtue is the death of conscience because it is the habit of Good, and yet the ethic of the honest man infinitely prefers virtue to the noblest agonies of conscience. Thus, being poses nonbeing and eliminates it. There is only being”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

(402).
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

Death

“He yawned. He had finished the day and he had also finished with his youth. Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism, smiling tolerance, resignation, common sense stoicism - all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life.”

Jean Paul Sartre book The Age of Reason

L'âge de raison (The Age of Reason) (1945)

Life , Youth , Smile , Failure

“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.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)
Source: Book 2, "The Melodious Child Dead in Me"

Life , Death

“…the reality of society involves the socialization of certain unrealities.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

455
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

Reality

“Catherine: Why commit Evil?
Goetz: Because Good has already been done.
Catherine: Who has done it?
Goetz: God the Father. I, on the other hand, am improvising.”

Jean Paul Sartre book The Devil and the Good Lord

Act 3, sc. 4
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

God , Evil

“The strangest mores of the most of-the-way societies will, in spite of everything, be relatively comprehensible to the person who has a flesh-and-blood knowledge of man’s needs, anxieties, and hopes. If, on the other hand, this experience is lacking, he will not even be able to understand the customs of those about him.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

139
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

Hope , Way , Understanding , Knowledge

“It is for the sake of order that I seduced Clytemnestra, for the sake of order that I killed my king. I wanted for order to rule and that it rule through me. I have lived without desire, without love, without hope: I made order. Oh! terrible and divine passion!”

Jean Paul Sartre The Flies

Aegistheus, Act 2
The Flies (1943)

Love , Hope , Passion

“The dreamer must contaminate the others by his dream, he must make them fall into it”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

(399).
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

Dreams

“All-powerful god, who am I but the fear that I inspire in others?”

Jean Paul Sartre The Flies

King Aegistheus to Jupiter, Act 2
The Flies (1943)

God , Fear

“I was your luxury. For nineteen years I have been put in your man’s world and was forbidden to touch anything and you made me think that all was going very well and that I did not have to worry about anything but putting flowers in vases. Why did you lie to me? Why did you keep me ignorant, if it was to admit to me one day that this world is cracking and that you are all powerless and to make me choose between a suicide and a murder?”

Jean Paul Sartre Dirty Hands

Jessica to Hugo, Act 5, sc. 2
Dirty Hands (1948)

Lie , World , Flowers , Thinking

“…man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.”

Jean Paul Sartre

Characterizations of Existentialism (1944)

World

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

Jean Paul Sartre

Interview (1960), Quoted in Susan Sontag's introduction to Barthes: Selected Writings, “Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes,” (1982)

Literature

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

Jean Paul Sartre book The Devil and the Good Lord

Act 1
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

Forgiveness , Light , Dead

“The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Nausea (1938)

Nature

“The consciousness of being betrayed is to the collective consciousness of a sacred group what a certain form of schizophrenia is to the individual…it is a form of madness.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

(193).
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

Madness

“If you want to deserve Hell, you need only stay in bed. The world is iniquity; if you accept it, you are an accomplice, if you change it you are an executioner.”

Jean Paul Sartre book The Devil and the Good Lord

Act 3, sc. 6
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

World , Hell , Change

“…the prisoner’s dreams is the guard’s spirituality”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

(400).
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

Dreams

“But, if it will help ease your irritated souls, please know, dearly departed, that you have ruined our lives.”

Jean Paul Sartre The Flies

Aegistheus, Act 2
The Flies (1943)

Soul , Help

“Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse.”

Jean Paul Sartre The Flies

Act 1
The Flies (1943)

“When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell a story: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow by too: you suddenly see people appear who speak and then go away; you plunge into stories of which you can't make head or tail: you'd make a terrible witness.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Diary entry of Tuesday, 30 January
Nausea (1938)

People , Appearance , Time

“It is the same thing: killing, dying, it is the same thing: one is just as alone in each. He is lucky, he will only die once. As for me, for ten days I have been killing him at every minute.”

Jean Paul Sartre Dirty Hands

Hugo to Jessica, on his plans to kill Hoederer, Act 5, sc. 2
Dirty Hands (1948)

“By turning my head slightly, I could see something out of the corner of my eye: it was a hand, the small white hand which slid along the table a little while ago. Now it was resting on its back, relaxed, soft and sensual, it had the indolent nudity of a woman sunning herself after bathing. A brown hairy object approached it, hesitant. It was a thick finger, yellowed by tobacco; inside this hand it had all the grossness of a male sex organ. It stopped for an instant, rigid, pointing at the fragile palm, then suddenly, it timidly began to stroke it. I was not surprised, I was only furious at the Self-Taught Man (L'Autodidacte); couldn't he hold himself back, the fool, didn't he realize the risk he was running?
The Self-Taught Man did not look surprised. He must have been expecting this for years. He must have imagined what would happen a hundred times, the day the Corsican would slip up behind him and a furious voice would resound suddenly in his ears. Yet he came back every evening, he feverishly pursued his reading and then, from time to time, like a thief, stroked a white hand or perhaps the leg of a small boy. It was resignation that I read on his face.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Nausea (1938)

Fools , Sex , Imagination , Boy

“Genet is a man-failure: he wills the impossible in order to derive from the tragic grandeur of this defeat the assurance that there is something other than the possible.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

(213).
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

Failure

“In some places the metropolis makes do with paying a clique of feudal overlords; in others, it has fabricated a fake bourgeoisie of colonized subjects in a system of divide and rule; elsewhere, it has killed two birds with one stone: the colony is both settlement and exploitation.”

Jean Paul Sartre

Source: Preface to The Wretched of the Earth (1961), p. xlvi

Bird

“How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Nausea (1938)

Hope , Past

“I, for my part, do not conceive an act as having causes, and I consider myself satisfied when I have found in it not its ‘factors’ but the general themes which it organizes: for our decisions gather into new syntheses and on new occasions the leitmotif that governs our life”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

P 461
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

Life , Decision , Parting

“For Genet, Beauty will be the offensive weapon that will enable him to beat the just on their own ground: that of value.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

405
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

Beauty

“Karsky: I met your father last week. Are you still interested in hearing how he is doing?
Hugo: No.
Karsky: It is very probable that you will be responsible for his death.
Hugo: It is virtually certain that he is responsible for my life. We are even.”

Jean Paul Sartre Dirty Hands

Act 4, sc. 4
Dirty Hands (1948)

Life , Death

“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 book The Devil and the Good Lord

Act 1
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

Men , Children , Heart

“In a world, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.”

Jean Paul Sartre

Characterizations of Existentialism (1944)

World , Suffering

“You see, I divide men into three categories: those who have a lot of money, those who have none at all and those who have a little. The first want to keep what they have: their interest is to maintain order; the second want to take what they do not have: their interest is to destroy the existing order and to establish one which is profitable to them. They each are realist, people with whom one can agree. The third group want to overthrow the social order to take what they do not have, while still preserving it so that no one takes away what they have. Thus, they preserve in fact what they destroy in theory, or they destroy in fact what they seem to preserve. Those are the idealists.”

Jean Paul Sartre book The Devil and the Good Lord

Act 3, sc. 3
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

Men , Money , People

“Commoners are weightless. But he was a royal bon vivant who, no matter what, always weighed 125 kilos. I would be very surprised if he didn’t have a few pounds left.”

Jean Paul Sartre The Flies

A soldier in Argos, speaking of the dead King Agamemnon, Act 2
The Flies (1943)

“To whomever gives a kiss or a blow
Render a kiss or blow
But to whomever gives when you are unable to return
Offer all the hatred in your heart
For you were slaves and he enslaves you”

Jean Paul Sartre book The Devil and the Good Lord

À celui qui donne un baiser ou un coup
Rendez un baiser ou un coup
Mais à celui qui donne sans que vous puissiez rendre
Offrez toute la haine de votre coeur
Car vous étiez esclaves et il vous asservit
Acts 8 & 9
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

Kiss , Heart

“I know nothing, I am neither woman nor girl; I have been living in a dream and when someone kissed me, it made me want to laugh. Now I am here before you, it seems as though I have just awakened and it is morning.”

Jean Paul Sartre Dirty Hands

Act 6, sc. 2
Dirty Hands (1948)

Dreams , Girl , Kiss

“esse est percipi, and he recognizes himself as being only insofar as he is perceived.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)
Original: (46).

“the martyr’s reflex”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

(463).
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

“There is no reality except in action.”

Jean Paul Sartre
Reality