Jean-Paul Sartre

Life begins on the other side of despair.

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

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

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.

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

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

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

Acting is happy agony.

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

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

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

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.

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

We do not judge the people we love.

If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.

Hell is other people.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.

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

Words are loaded pistols.

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

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

You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.

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.

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

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.

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

God is absence. God is the solitude of man.

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

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

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

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.

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.

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

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

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

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

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

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.

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

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.

It is only in our decisions that we are important.

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

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

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

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

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

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

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.

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

We must act out passion before we can feel it.