Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism, a French playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic.
His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to do so.
Here is a collection of Jean-Paul Sartre most inspiring quotes: Jean-Paul Sartre quotes on love, life and freedom. Quotes and sayings about existentialism, religion and marriage by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Jean-Paul Sartre Famous Quotes and Sayings
Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.
The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
In love, one and one are one.
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.
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.
Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.
Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.
It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.
If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.
It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.
Hell is other people.
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.
Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is -other people!
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.
I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.
I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.
It is up to you to give life a meaning.
I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then anything, anything could happen.
Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think any more, I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I... because... ugh!
We are our choices.
He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.
When the rich wage war it's the poor who die.
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.
Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.
Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.
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.
There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.
The worst part about being lied to is knowing you werent worth the truth.
Life begins on the other side of despair.
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.
You are your life, and nothing else.
I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.
She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.
You must be like me; you must suffer in rhythm.
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up; I forget them almost immediately.
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?
Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.
Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.
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.
Man is what he wills himself to be.
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.
Words are loaded pistols.
We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.
Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.
I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.
Existence is an imperfection.
That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.
To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.
Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.
There is only one day left, always starting over: It is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished.
I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.
Little flashes of sun on the surface of a cold, dark sea.
Man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does.
One always dies too soon - or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are - your life, and nothing else.
I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything.
As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.
I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books.
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.
Life has no meaning, the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.
The individual's duty is to do what he wants to do, to think whatever he likes, to be accountable to no one but himself, to challenge every idea and every person.
I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.
Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
your judgement judges you and defines you.
Life is a useless passion.
In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.
I do not think, therefore I am a moustache.
Perhaps its inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is.
There is a universe behind and before him. And the day is approaching when closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left; he will say to himself, "now what?"
To think new thoughts you have to break the bones in your head.
I wanted my own words. But the ones I use have been dragged through I don't know how many consciences.
I am myself and I am here.
Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.
I confused things with their names: that is belief.
It is only in our decisions that we are important.
Nothingness haunts Being.
He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.
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.
Existence is prior to essence. Death is a continuation of my life without me...
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 dropped out of their hearts like a little sparrow fallen from its nest. So gather me up, dear, fold me to your heart - and you'll see how nice I can be.
We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.
Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.
The consciousness that says "I am" is not the consciousness that thinks.
A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness... and suddenly the "I" pales, pales, and fades out.
A madman's ravings are absurd in relation to the situation in which he finds himself, but not in relation to his madness.
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.
What is important is not what happens to us, but how we respond to what happens to us.
One could only damage oneself through the harm one did to others. One could never get directly at oneself.
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.
People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing.
It's strange. I felt less lonely when I didn't know you.
An individual chooses and makes himself.
All men are Prophets or else God does not exist.
Once freedom lights its beacon in man's heart, the gods are powerless against him.
It is disgusting - Why must we have bodies?
Commitment is an act, not a word.
I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.
We do not judge the people we love.
The Nausea has not left me and I don't believe it will leave me so soon; but I no longer have to bear it, it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is I.
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
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.
The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.
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.
Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.
What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence.
Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.
Sometimes the truth is too simple for intellectuals.
Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.
Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.
We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.
In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.
Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.
Also read: