Jean-Paul Sartre quotes
French existentialist novelist and philosopher. Held that existence precedes essence — we are condemned to be free, and to bear the weight of our choices.
50 passages across 11 themes. More on Jean-Paul Sartre.
On freedom
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
“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.”
“I hate victims who respect their executioners.”
“I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.”
“For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.”
“I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.”
“To eat is to appropriate by destruction.”
“It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Yes, I am so free. And what a superb absence is my soul.”
“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.”
“I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.”
On action
“A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.”
“Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.”
“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.”
“Blood doubly unites us, for we share the same blood and we have spilled blood.”
On time
“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.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
On presence
“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?”
“All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.”
“But, if it will help ease your irritated souls, please know, dearly departed, that you have ruined our lives.”
On fear
“Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.”
“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.”
“You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.”
“All-powerful god, who am I but the fear that I inspire in others?”
On truth
“She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.”
“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.”
“As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.”
On death
“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.”
On purpose
“Life has no meaning a priori. It is up to you to give it a meaning.”
On kindness
“Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.”
On friendship
“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?”
On hope
“How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?”