Top 450 Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “We are our choices.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Featured in: Choices Quotes

2. “Commitment is an act, not a word.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Featured in: Commitment Quotes

3. “Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Featured in: Silence Quotes

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Featured in: Freedom Quotes

5. “Man is condemned to be free.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Featured in: Philosophical Quotes

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Featured in: Responsibility Quotes, Freedom Quotes

7. “It is up to you to give life a meaning.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

8. “We make our own hell out of the people around us.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

10. “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.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Featured in: Action Quotes, Purpose Quotes

11. “There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Featured in: Beautiful Quotes

12. “Words are loaded pistols.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Featured in: Thought Provoking Quotes

13. “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Featured in: Responsibility Quotes

14. “Once we know and are aware, we are responsible for our action and our inaction. We can do something about it or ignore it. Either way, we are still responsible.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

16. “I hate victims who respect their executioners.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Featured in: Judging Quotes

17. “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.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

18. “To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Featured in: Risk-Taking Quotes

19. “Life begins on the other side of despair.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

20. “Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

22. “I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

24. “Death is a continuation of my life without me...”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

25. “Man’s existence precedes his essence.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

26. “Life is a useless passion.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

27. “We do not judge the people we love.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

28. “What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

30. “Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

32. “It is only in our decisions that we are important.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Featured in: Quotes for Better Decisions

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

34. “Introspection is always retrospection.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

35. “We must act out passion before we can feel it.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

37. “Hell is other people at breakfast.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

38. “I am myself and I am here.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

39. “Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

40. “To think new thoughts you have to break the bones in your head.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

41. “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.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

42. “Is there really nothing, nothing left of me?”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

43. “Man is what he wills himself to be.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

44. “Several hours or several years make no difference once you have lost eternity.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

45. “Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the of it is nothing other than the sense you choose.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

46. “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.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

47. “I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

48. “The coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

49. “In a word, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

50. “In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre