What Jean-Paul Sartre Actually Said About Action
All 12 Jean-Paul Sartre passages on action, in full — what each one claims, what holds them together, and who argues the other way.
Jean-Paul Sartre returns to action twelve times in thinkr's library — more often than to almost anything else. French existentialist novelist and philosopher. Held that existence precedes essence — we are condemned to be free, and to bear the weight of our choices.
What follows is every one of those passages, in full, with what each is actually claiming. The language is of its period, but the question underneath is not: what is action for, and what does it ask of you?
Every Jean-Paul Sartre passage 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.”
What holds these together
Read in sequence rather than one at a time, the passages stop being separate aphorisms. Jean-Paul Sartre is not offering twelve opinions about action; the lines are facets of one position, and the repetition is the argument. The shortest of them — “Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets” — is the version you can carry, and the longer ones are what it unpacks into.
Jean-Paul Sartre applied to a real decision
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what the position actually does when it meets a situation where every option costs something. thinkr puts two such cases to Jean-Paul Sartre.
You can choose the easier year or the harder, better one.
Argued as existential challenge: 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.
Argued as authentic freedom: You are refusing bad faith: the bargain where comfort costs your selfhood. The risk is turning every compromise into betrayal.
Work through these yourself
- You can choose the easier year or the harder, better one. — argued from existential challenge and several competing positions
- A group accepts you only when you hide a real part of yourself. — argued from authentic freedom and several competing positions
Who disagrees
Plato, Seneca, Mahatma Gandhi and Lao Tzu all address action too, and they do not converge. Reading Jean-Paul Sartre alone gives you a coherent position; reading Jean-Paul Sartre against Plato shows you what the position is actually choosing against.