Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher, writer, and political activist. He is best known for his philosophical work, particularly his existentialist ideas, which focused on the individual's responsibility for their own actions and decisions. He is also known for his influential works of literature such as his novel Nausea and his play No Exit. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Jean-Paul Sartre on freedom, love, death.
The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.
Commitment is an act, not a word.
She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.
Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.
Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes About Freedom
Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Once freedom lights its beacon in man's heart, the gods are powerless against him. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.
Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. — Jean-Paul Sartre
A human being who wakened in the morning with a queesy stomach, with fifteen hours to kill before next bedtime, had not much use for freedom. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Therefore, in the nature of this will for freedom, which freedom itself implies, I may pass judgement on those who seek to hide from themselves the complete arbitrariness and the complete freedom of their existence. — Jean-Paul Sartre
We are our choices.
Man is condemned to be free — Jean-Paul Sartre
Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes essence. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death. — Jean-Paul Sartre
motivational quote by Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes About Love
We do not judge the people we love. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good. — Jean-Paul Sartre
To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June — Jean-Paul Sartre
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
We will not go to Heaven,Goetz, and even if we both entered it, we would not have eyes to see each other, nor hands to touch each other. Up there, God gets all the attention.... We can only love on this earth and against God. — Jean-Paul Sartre
It is too early to love. We will buy the right to do so by shedding blood. — Jean-Paul Sartre
There is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving. — Jean-Paul Sartre
When we love animals and children too much, we love them at the expense of men. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes About Death
I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it. — Jean-Paul Sartre
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
Death is a continuation of my life without me. — Jean-Paul Sartre
The more absurd life is, the more insupportable death is. — Jean-Paul Sartre
He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end. — Jean-Paul Sartre
What the painter adds to the canvas are the days of his life. The adventure of living, hurtling toward death. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Something begins in order to end: an adventure doesn't let itself be extended it achieves significance only through its death. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I committed the first crime by creating men as mortals. After that, what more could you do, you the murderers? Come on; they already had death in them: at most you simply hastened things a little. — Jean-Paul Sartre
A good hanging now and then -- that entertains folk in the provinces and robs death of its glamour. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes About Existentialism
It is not a matter of indifference whether we like oysters or clams, snails or shrimp, if only we know how to unravel the existential significance of these foods. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted. — Jean-Paul Sartre
People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked? — Jean-Paul Sartre
Nothingness haunts Being. — Jean-Paul Sartre
In a word, 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
Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough. — Jean-Paul Sartre
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
Absurd, irreducible; nothing--not even a profound and secret delirium of nature--could explain [a tree root]. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes About Life
In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Life begins on the other side of despair. — Jean-Paul Sartre
You are -- your life, and nothing else. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Handing over a bank note is enough to make a bicycle belong to me, but my entire life is needed to realize this possession. — Jean-Paul Sartre
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Naturally, in the course of my life I have made lots of mistakes, large and small, for one reason or another, but at the heart of it all, every time I made a mistake it was because I was not radical enough. — Jean-Paul Sartre
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
We cannot withdraw our cards from the game. Were we as silent and mute as stones, our very passivity would be an act. — Jean-Paul Sartre
The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes About Existentialist
There are two kinds of existentialist; first, those who are Christian...and on the other hand the atheistic existentialists, among whom...I class myself. What they have in common is that they think that existence precedes essence, or, if you prefer, that subjectivity must be the turning point. — Jean-Paul Sartre
The existentialist says at once that man is anguish. — Jean-Paul Sartre
The existentialist — Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes About Writer
A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honorable form. — Jean-Paul Sartre
A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Like morality, literature needs to be universal. So that the writer must put himself on the side of the majority, of the two billion starving, if he wishes to be able to speak to all and be read by all. Failing that, he is at the service of a privileged class and, like it, an exploiter. — Jean-Paul Sartre
The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose, not his individuality, but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him. — Jean-Paul Sartre
The lad who dreams of being a boxing champion or an admiral chooses reality. If the writer chooses the imaginary, he confuses the two. — Jean-Paul Sartre
A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words. — Jean-Paul Sartre
As long as the writer cannot write for the two billion men who are hungry, he will be oppressed by a feeling of malaise. — Jean-Paul Sartre
[Andre] Gide can say it to me: it is a writer's morality only addressed to a few privileged
people. For that reason it no longer interests me. — Jean-Paul Sartre
That is exactly the writer's problem. What does literature stand for in a hungry world? — Jean-Paul Sartre
Originally, poetry creates the myth, while the prose-writer draws its portrait. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes About People
Hell is other people at breakfast. — Jean-Paul Sartre
There are two ways of destroying a people. Either condemn them en bloc or force them to repudiate the leaders they adopted. The second is the worse. — Jean-Paul Sartre
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
Hell is other people. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience. — Jean-Paul Sartre
When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die. — Jean-Paul Sartre
So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: Hell is other people. — Jean-Paul Sartre
There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Two people can form a community by excluding a third. — Jean-Paul Sartre
So much torture, bloodshed, deceit. You cannot make your young people practice torture twenty-four hours a day and not expect to pay a price for it. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes About Responsible
We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Once we know and are aware, we are responsible for our action and our inaction. We can do something about it or ignore it. Either way, we are still responsible. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
It is up to you to give [life] a meaning. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I am responsible for everything... except my very responsibility. — Jean-Paul Sartre
When one does nothing, one believes oneself responsible for everything. — Jean-Paul Sartre
We do not wish to say only that a man is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for that of all men. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices. — Jean-Paul Sartre
To be responsible is to be the uncontested author of an event or thing. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Man is abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no aim but what he sets himself. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes About World
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
One of the chief motives of artistic creation is certainly the need of feeling that we are essential in relationship to the world. — Jean-Paul Sartre
The revolution you dream of is not ours. You don't want to change the world; you want to blow it up. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not. He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon
toward himself to recover his inner being. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total... because it may well involve the whole world. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Abjection is a methodological conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian epoche: it establishes the world as a closed system which consciousness regards from without, in the manner of divine understanding. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I was a neophyte in another world [in 1954]. — Jean-Paul Sartre
The world would get along very well without literature. It would get along even better without man. — Jean-Paul Sartre
What never vary are the necessities of being in the world, of having to labor and to die there. — Jean-Paul Sartre
What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterward. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes About Poor
When the rich [and politically powerful] make war, it's the poor [and politically weak] who die. — Jean-Paul Sartre
When the rich wage war it is the poor who die. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Better a good journalist than a poor assassin. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I have nothing but contempt for you idiotic chosen ones who have the heart to rejoice when there are the damned in Hell and the poor on earth; as for me, I am on the side of men and I will not leave it. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre Famous Quotes And Sayings
He who asks a question is a fool for a minute; he who does not remains a fool forever.
When you realize that by changing your perspective, big things can be seen as little things, it becomes much harder to worry about anything. Commitment is an act, not a word. — Jean-Paul Sartre
What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence. — Jean-Paul Sartre
If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Everything has been figured out, except how to live. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth. — Jean-Paul Sartre
We do not judge the people we love. — Jean-Paul Sartre
There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk. — Jean-Paul Sartre
God is dead. Let us not understand by this that he does not exist or even that he no longer exists. He is dead. He spoke to us and is silent. We no longer have anything but his cadaver. Perhaps he
slipped out of the world, somewhere else like the soul of a dead man. Perhaps he was only a dream...God is dead. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Man is what he wills himself to be. — Jean-Paul Sartre
We must act out passion before we can feel it. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Hell is other people at breakfast. — Jean-Paul Sartre
The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men. — Jean-Paul Sartre
The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusions … and without resignation either. He stares at death with passionate attention and this fascination liberates him. He experiences the “divine irresponsibility” of the condemned man. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete. — Jean-Paul Sartre
My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think… and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite. — Jean-Paul Sartre
It’s the well-behaved children that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don’t say a word, they don’t hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on, they make society pay dearly. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I do not think therefore I am a moustache — Jean-Paul Sartre
Words are loaded pistols. — Jean-Paul Sartre
All I can do is make the best of what I am, become accustomed to it, evaluate the possibilities, and take advantage of them the best I can. — Jean-Paul Sartre
A kiss without a moustache, they said then, is like an egg without salt; I will add to it: and it is like Good without Evil. — Jean-Paul Sartre
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
Philosophy which does not help to illuminate the process of the liberation of the oppressed should be rejected. — Jean-Paul Sartre
If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically. — Jean-Paul Sartre
It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous. — Jean-Paul Sartre
What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me. — Jean-Paul Sartre
The [Communist] Party has one objective: the creation of a socialist economy; and one means: the utilization of the class struggle. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Let it crumble! Let the rocks revile me and flowers wilt at my coming. Your whole universe is not enough to prove me wrong. You are the king of gods, king of stones and stars, king of the waves of the sea. But you are not the king of man. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I confused things with their names: that is belief. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think. — Jean-Paul Sartre
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. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Violence is good for those who have nothing to lose. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes. — Jean-Paul Sartre
There were days when you peered into yourself, into the secret places of your heart, and what you saw there made you faint with horror. And then, next day, you didn't know what to make of it,you couldn't interpret the horror you had glimpsed the day before. Yes, you know what evil costs. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I will not be modest. Humble, as much as you like, but not modest. Modesty is the virtue of the lukewarm. — Jean-Paul Sartre
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. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I have such a desire to sleep and am so much behind my sleep. A good night, one good night and all this nonsense will be swept away. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I am a man, Jupiter, and each man must invent his own path. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I hate victims who respect their executioners. — Jean-Paul Sartre
At times discreetly, at times disgustingly, I yielded to the most fatal temptation whenever I could no longer bear it: as a result of impatience, Orpheus lost Eurydice; as a result of impatience, I lost myself. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted. — Jean-Paul Sartre
God is absence. God is the solitude of man. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Ideas come in pairs and they contradict one another; their opposition is the principal engine of reflection. — Jean-Paul Sartre
To keep hope alive one must, in spite of all mistakes, horrors, and crimes, recognize the obvious superiority of the socialist camp. — Jean-Paul Sartre
You take souls for vegetables.... The gardener can decide what will become of his carrots but no one can choose the good of others for them. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being. — Jean-Paul Sartre
What I regretted in La Nausee was not to have put myself completely into the thing. I remained outside my hero's disease, protected by my neurosis which, through writing, gave me happiness. — Jean-Paul Sartre
For the artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is enchanted with it. — Jean-Paul Sartre
No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point. — Jean-Paul Sartre
That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Life Lessons by Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre taught the importance of living authentically and making decisions that reflect your individual values and beliefs.
He argued that life is what we make of it, and that we are responsible for our own actions and choices.
He encouraged us to take ownership of our lives and to live with intention and purpose.
Citation
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