Best 484 quotes of Jean-paul Sartre on MyQuotes

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.

Absurd, irreducible; nothing--not even a profound and secret delirium of nature--could explain [a tree root].

Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound and secret delirium of nature — could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it.

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.

Acting is happy agony.

Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.

Aegistheus, the kings have another secret.... Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the Gods can do nothing against that man. It is a matter for men to handle amongst themselves, and it is up to other men and to them alone to let him flee or to destroy him.

A good hanging now and then -- that entertains folk in the provinces and robs death of its glamour.

Ah! How I hate the crimes of the new generation: they are dry and sterile as darnel.

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.

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

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.

All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure.

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.

All I want is' - and he uttered the final words through clenched teeth and with a sort of shame - 'to retain my freedom.' I should myself have thought,' said Jacques, 'that freedom consisted in frankly confronting situations into which one had deliberately entered, and accepting all one's responsibilities. But that, no doubt, is not your view.

All-powerful god, who am I but the fear that I inspire in others?

All the same, they [books] do serve some purpose. Culture doesn't save anything or anyone, it doesn't justify. But it's a product of man: he projects himself into it, he recognizes himself in it; that critical mirror alone offers him his image.

A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.

A madman's ravings are absurd in relation to the situation in which he finds himself, but not in relation to his madness.

A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.

And I too wanted to be. That is all I wanted; and this is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts which seemed without bounds, I find the same desire again: to drive existence out of me, to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note. That could even make an apologue: there was a poor man who got in the wrong world.

[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.

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.

A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness...and suddenly the “I” pales, pales, and fades out.

As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

As for the square at Meknes, where I used to go every day, it's even simpler: I do not see it at all anymore. All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words that are indivisibly bound together: a charming square at Meknes. ... I don't see anything any more: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.

As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.

As long as the writer cannot write for the two billion men who are hungry, he will be oppressed by a feeling of malaise.

A Soviet citizen, an official writer, once said to me: "The day when Communism (that is, well-being for everyone) reigns, man's tragedy will begin: his finitude.

At that time [1954], as a result of political events, I was deeply preoccupied by my relations with the Communist Party.

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.

A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.

A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.

Because the Nazi venom worked its way even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest; because an all-powerful police sought to force us into silence every word became as precious as a declaration of principle; because we were persecuted, each of our gestures carried the weight of a commitment.

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.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

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.

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

But for me there is neither Monday nor Sunday: there are days which pass in disorder, and then, sudden lightning like this one. Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I can't describe it, it's like the Nausea and yet it's just the opposite: at last an adventure happens to me and when I question myself I see that it happens that I am myself and that I am here; I am the one who splits in the night, I am as happy as the hero of a novel.

But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place.

But [your crime] will be there, one hundred times denied, always there, dragging itself behind you. Then you will finally know that you have committed your life with one throw of the die, once and for all, and there is nothing you can do but tug our crime along until your death. Such is the law, just and unjust, of repentance. Then we will see what will become of your young pride.

Commitment is an act, not a word.

Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.

[Contemporary writer] could be a kind of [Samuel] Beckett who would not be felt to be totally committed to despair.

Criminals together. We're in hell, my little friend, and there's never any mistake there. People are not damned for nothing.

Criticism often takes from the tree caterpillars and blossoms together.

Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.

Do you think I can read [Alain] Robbe-Grillet in an underdeveloped country? He does not feel himself maimed.

Either the USSR was not the country of socialism, in which case socialism didn't exist anywhere and doubtless, wasn't possible: or else, socialism was that, this abominable monster, this police state, the power of beasts of prey.

emotion is first of all and in principle an accident