Jean Paul Sartre: Nothing

Jean Paul Sartre was French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. Explore interesting quotes on nothing.
Jean Paul Sartre: 642   quotes 51   likes

“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”

Jean Paul Sartre

No Exit (1944)
Variant: A man is what he wills himself to be.
Source: Existentialism and Human Emotions

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

Jean Paul Sartre book The Words

The Words (1964), speaking of his grandmother.

“Life has no meaning a priori … It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.”

Jean Paul Sartre

Source: Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), p. 58

Life

“Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of form a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Source: Nausea

Heart

“If you die, I will lie down beside you and I will stay there until the end, without eating or drinking, you will rot in my arms and I will love you as carcass: for you love nothing if you do not love everything.”

Jean Paul Sartre book The Devil and the Good Lord

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

Love , Lie , Drink

“Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound and secret delirium of nature — could explain it.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Reflections on a chestnut tree root.
Nausea (1938)
Context: Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound and secret delirium of nature — could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it.

Secret , Nature

“It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Being and Nothingness

Source: Being and Nothingness

Feeling , Thinking

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

Jean Paul Sartre book The Words

Source: The Words

Books , Religion

“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 book Nausea

Source: Nausea

People , Change

“One always dies too soon — or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.”

Jean Paul Sartre No Exit

On meurt toujours trop tôt - ou trop tard. Et cependant la vie est là, terminée : le trait est tiré, il faut faire la somme. Tu n'es rien d'autre que ta vie.
Inès, Act 1, sc. 5
No Exit (1944)

Life

“Perhaps its inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is.”

Jean Paul Sartre book The Age of Reason

Source: The Age of Reason

“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.”

Jean Paul Sartre
Life

“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.”

Jean Paul Sartre book The Wall

Source: The Wall

Way

“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!”

Jean Paul Sartre Dirty Hands

Jessica, Act 3, sc. 1
Dirty Hands (1948)

Children , Time

“…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.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

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

Personality

“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.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Being and Nothingness

Being and Nothingness (1943)

Heart

“I grasp at each second, trying to suck it dry: nothing happens which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever in myself, nothing, neither the fugitive tenderness of those lovely eyes, nor the noises of the street, nor the false dawn of early morning: and even so the minute passes and I do not hold it back, I like to see it pass.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Nausea (1938)

Love , Falseness