France, 1905–1980
Jean-Paul Sartre
French existentialist novelist and philosopher. Held that existence precedes essence — we are condemned to be free, and to bear the weight of our choices.
Jean-Paul Sartre in 50 lines
Every Jean-Paul Sartre passage in thinkr's library, with the theme each one speaks to.
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
“Life has no meaning a priori. It is up to you to give it a meaning.”
“Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.”
“Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.”
“Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.”
“Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.”
“Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.”
“To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.”
“If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.”
“A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.”
“She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.”
“I hate victims who respect their executioners.”
“People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?”
“I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.”
“I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.”
“Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”
“Monsieur ... I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.”
“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.”
“As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.”
“I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.”
“The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.”
“Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?”
“For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.”
“All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.”
“How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?”
“I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.”
“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.”
“To eat is to appropriate by destruction.”
“In order to make myself recognized by the Other, I must risk my own life. To risk one's life, in fact, is to reveal oneself as not-bound to the objective form or to any determined existence — as not-bound to life.”
“All human activities are equivalent ... and ... all are on principle doomed to failure.”
“It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.”
“Admit it, it is your youth that you regret, more even than your crime; it is my youth you hate, even more than my innocence.”
“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.”
“They are in bad faith — they are afraid — and fear, bad faith have an aroma that the gods find delicious. Yes, the gods like that, the pitiful souls.”
“Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.”
“Yes, I am so free. And what a superb absence is my soul.”
“You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.”
“Her face seems ravaged by both lightning and hail. But on yours there is something like the promise of a storm: one day passion will burn it to the bone.”
“A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.”
“What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.”
“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.”
“All-powerful god, who am I but the fear that I inspire in others?”
“Blood doubly unites us, for we share the same blood and we have spilled blood.”
“But, if it will help ease your irritated souls, please know, dearly departed, that you have ruined our lives.”
“I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.”
“He is dead, and my hatred has died with him.”
“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.”
Where Jean-Paul Sartre lands on a hard choice
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what a position does when it meets a situation where every option costs something.
You can choose the easier year or the harder, better one.
You are treating growth as a responsibility, not a mood. The risk is worshiping difficulty for its own sake.
A group accepts you only when you hide a real part of yourself.
You are refusing bad faith: the bargain where comfort costs your selfhood. The risk is turning every compromise into betrayal.
Your workplace rewards a version of you that feels false.
You are taking ownership of your participation. The risk is confusing every constraint with oppression.
Love asks you to change in ways you did not expect.
You are refusing to make belonging depend on disappearance. The danger is mistaking vulnerability for captivity.
You have to decide before you feel certain.
You are accepting that action often precedes proof. The danger is dressing impulse as courage.
You are good at the work and no longer want it.
You are treating your own wanting as evidence rather than noise. The cost is that talent does not transfer as cleanly as courage assumes.
Someone who never refuses you has asked for something hard.
You are refusing to purchase approval with a commitment you will regret. The cost is a debt the other person may feel you have declined to pay.
A promise you made sincerely no longer fits who you are.
You are choosing the honest rupture over the slow one. The danger is a freedom that leaves someone else holding the bill.
The work is good and you keep finding reasons to hold it.
You are naming the thing holding the work rather than the work's flaws. The danger is self-diagnosis used as another form of delay.
The better-paid job is the one that means less to you.
You are treating daily hours as the substance of a life rather than its price. The cost is a purity that other people may end up subsidising.
Staying where you are from is costing you what you could become.
You are choosing the self you might make over the one you were handed. The risk is mistaking a change of place for a change of person.
You cannot tell if you are finding yourself or inventing one.
You are taking responsibility for the construction rather than waiting for a discovery. The cost is exhausting work with no resting point.
Something you did years ago has resurfaced and people want an answer.
You are asserting that the person who acted is genuinely gone. The danger is using change as a way to never face it.
Lessons that quote Jean-Paul Sartre
- Bad Faith & Radical Freedom — Sartre on self-deception and total responsibility
Reading Jean-Paul Sartre today
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1905–1980, from France — a world with different assumptions about authority, death and what a life is for. That distance is useful rather than a problem: it is what lets the ideas cut against assumptions you did not know you were making.
In thinkr, Jean-Paul Sartre is one of 44 thinkers you can put a real question to, and the answers come back in that thinker's own voice and commitments rather than as a neutral summary. The 50 passages above are what the app draws on.
Working at roughly the same time
- Albert Camus — France/Algeria, 1913–1960
- Arthur Schopenhauer — Germany, 1788–1860
- Bertrand Russell — UK, 1872–1970
- Carl Jung — Switzerland, 1875–1961
- Friedrich Nietzsche — Germany, 1844–1900
- Hannah Arendt — Germany & United States, 1906–1975
Argues the same cases
Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, Buddha, Epictetus, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill take positions on the same dilemmas as Jean-Paul Sartre, which is usually where the disagreements become concrete.