Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

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.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.

If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.

What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

[It is a matter of choice, not chance.] Such is the first principle of existentialism.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Before you come alive, life is nothing;

it 's up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.

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.

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.

We do not judge the people we love.

your judgement judges you and defines you

There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

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.

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.

Man is what he wills himself to be.

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

the worst part about being lied to is knowing you werent worth the truth

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.

Hell is other people at breakfast.

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.

Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.

The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.

Commitment is an act, not a word.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

When the rich [and politically powerful] make war, it's the poor [and politically weak] who die.

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.

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.

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.

I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.

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

I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.

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.

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.

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.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

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.

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.

I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

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.

I do not think therefore I am a moustache

Words are loaded pistols.

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.