Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

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

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

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

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

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

Hell is other people.

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

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

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

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

Commitment is an act, not a word.

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

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

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

We do not judge the people we love.

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

Life begins on the other side of despair.

Acting is happy agony.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Words are loaded pistols.

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

Existence precedes and rules essence.

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

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

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

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

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.

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

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.

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

It is only in our decisions that we are important.

God is absence. God is the solitude of man.

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