Jean-Paul Sartre quotes:

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

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

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.

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

We do not judge the people we love.

Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.

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

When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.

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.

What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.

I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

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

I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.

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

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

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.

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

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

When the rich wage war it's the poor who die.

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

God is absence. God is the solitude of man.

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

Life begins on the other side of despair.

Then time started flowing again and the emptiness grew larger.

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

I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.

This then is the age of reason.

Acting is happy agony.

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Criticism often takes from the tree caterpillars and blossoms together.

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.

The [Communist] Party has one objective: the creation of a socialist economy; and one means: the utilization of the class struggle.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

your judgement judges you and defines you

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

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.

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

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

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.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

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.

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.

I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me, and I have followed the source of rivers towards their source or plunged into forests, always making for other cities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; and I could never turn back any more than a record can spin in reverse. And all that was leading me where ? To this very moment...

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

The more one is absorbed in fighting evil, the less one is tempted to place the good in question.

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

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else's nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon.

The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

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.

Handing over a bank note is enough to make a bicycle belong to me, but my entire life is needed to realize this possession.

In any case, if you ever leave me with a handsome man, do not tell me that you trust me because, let me warn you: that is not what will prevent me from deceiving you, if I want to. On the contrary.

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?

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

I maintain that inversion is the effect of neither a prenatal choice nor an endocrinal malformation nor even the passive and determined result of complexes. It is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.

To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June

To keep hope alive one must, in spite of all mistakes, horrors, and crimes, recognize the obvious superiority of the socialist camp.

L'homme est condamne a' e" tre libre. Man is condemned to be free.

I do not think therefore I am a moustache

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.

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

Your scare me rather. My reflection in the glass never did that; of course, I knew it so well. Like something I had tamed...I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.

Man is what he wills himself to be.

It is not the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner. A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honorable form.

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.

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

Words are loaded pistols.

Time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.

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.

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.

I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.

If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light.

Listen to me: a family man is never a real family man. An assassin is never entirely assassin. They play a role, you understand. While a dead man, he is really dead. To be or not to be, right?

The revolution you dream of is not ours. You don't want to change the world; you want to blow it up.

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

Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.

When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.

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.

Amuse yourself, torment your desires. Drink when you're thirsty -- that would be very much too simple! If you didn't harbour a temptation eternally in your soul, you'd run the risk of forgetting yourself.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

Nothingness haunts Being.

There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.

Death is a continuation of my life without me...

A little more and I would have fallen into the mirror trap. I avoided it, but only to fall into the window trap: with nothing to do, my arms dangling, I go over to the window.

People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing.

There is no reality except in action. Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life.

I've lived the life of a man without teeth, he thought about it. A life of a man without teeth. I've never bitten, I've been waiting, keeping myself for later - and now I've just ascertained that I don't have teeth anymore.

...freedom only gives you something to be sorry for.

Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.

Existentialism is no mournful delectation but a humanist philosophy of action, effort, combat, and solidarity. Man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines say what this man is before he dies, or what mankind is before it has disappeared.

Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man....

With older people, it's quite different. They're reliable, they show you what to do, and there's solidity in their affection.

I see the insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon.

Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.

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.

This instant which I cannot leave, which locks me in and limits me on every side, this instant I am made of will be no more than a confused dream.

It answers the question that was tormenting you: my love, you are not 'one thing in my life' - not even the most important - because my life no longer belongs to me because...you are always me.

Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.

In love, one and one are one.

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

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.

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.