Top 450 Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “But no: he was empty, he was confronted by a vast anger, a desperate anger, he saw it and could almost have touched it. But it was inert – if it were to live and find expression and suffer, he must lend it his own body. It was other people’s anger. “Swine!” He clenched his fists, he strode along, but nothing came, the anger remained external to himself.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

452. “You might think that there’s some authority you could look for to answers, but all of the authorities you can think of are fake.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

453. “She is dearer to me than life. But her suffering comes from within, and only she can rid herself of it. For she is free.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

454. “When you want to understand something you stand in front of it, alone, without help: all the past in the world is of no use.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

455. “Madame Picard believed that a child should be allowed to read anything: ‘A book never does any harm if it is well written.’ While she was there, I had once asked permission to read Madame Bovary and my mother, in an oversweet voice, had said: ‘But if my darling reads books like that at his age, what will he do when he grows up?’ ‘I shall live them!’ This reply had met with the most complete and lasting success.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

456. “Lucien thought with bitter pleasure that his parents found him looking fine. “I don’t exist.” He closed his eyes and let himself drift: existence is an illusion because I know I don t exist, all I have to do is plug my ears and not think about anything and I’ll become nothingness.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

457. “Anny hasn’t changed her letter paper, I wonder if she still buys it at the little stationer’s in Piccadilly. I think that she has also kept her coiffure, her heavy blonde locks she didn’t want to cut. She must struggle patiently in front of mirrors to save her face: it isn’t vanity or fear of growing old; she wants to stay as she is, just as she is. Perhaps this is what I liked best in her, this austere loyalty to her most insignificant features.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

458. “I was neither a grandfather, nor a father, nor even a husband. I didn’t vote, I scarcely paid any taxes; I couldn’t lay claim to the rights of a tax-payer, nor to those of an elector, nor even to the humble right to honour which twenty years of obedience confer on an employee. My existence was beginning to cause me serious concern. Was I a mere figment of the imagination?”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

459. “In irony a man annihilates what he posits within one and the same act; he leads us to believe in order not to be believed; he affirms to deny and denies to affirm; he creatives a positive object but it has no being other than its nothingness.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

460. “How far away from them I feel, up on this hill. It seems to me that I belong to another species.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

461. “Before beginning this treatise, he wanted the advice of The Baboon, his philosophy prof. “Excuse me, sir,” he said at the end of a class, “could anyone claim that we don’t exist?” The Baboon said no. “Goghito,” he said, “ergo zum. You exist because you doubt your existence.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

462. “Everything happens to every man as if the entire human race were staring at him and measuring itself by what he does. So every man ought to be asking himself, “Am I really a man who is entitled to act in such a way that the entire human race should be measuring itself by my actions?” And if he does not ask himself that, he masks his anguish.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

463. “I glance around the room. What a comedy! All these people sitting there, looking serious, eating. No, they aren’t eating: they are recuperating in order to successfully finish their tasks. Each one of them has his little personal difficulty which keeps him from noticing that he exists; there isn’t one of them who doesn’t believe himself indispensable to something or someone.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

464. “But the end is there, transforming everything. For us, the man is already the hero of the story. His moroseness, his money troubles are much more precious than ours, they are all gilded by the light of future passions.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

465. “Every man ought to say to himself, “Am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

466. “You didn’t succeed. Well, what of that? There’s nothing to prove, you know, and the revolution’s not a question of virtue but of effectiveness. There is no heaven. There’s work to be done, that’s all. And you must do what you’re cut out for; all the better if it comes easy to you. The best work is not the work that takes the most sacrifice. It’s the work in which you can best succeed.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

467. “But this richness was lost in confusion and finally was no more because it was too much.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

468. “On this Earth that bleeds, all joy is obscene, and all happy men must live alone.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

469. “Suddenly they existed, then suddenly they existed no longer: existence is without memory; of the vanished it retains nothing – not even a memory. Existence everywhere, infinitely, in excess, for ever and everywhere; existence – which is limited only by existence.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

470. “A man rarely feels like laughing alone.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

471. “Love’s a grand solace, isn’t it, my friend? Deep and dark as sleep.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

472. “I’m not obstinate, I’m highly strung: I don’t know how to let myself go. I must always think of what is happening to me – it’s a form of self-protection.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

473. “Everything looks so much alike that you wonder how people got the idea of inventing names, to make distinctions.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

474. “Things are entirely what they appear to be and BEHIND THEM... there is nothing.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

475. “What makes or breaks a man is not what people think of him, but what he thinks of himself.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

476. “I’ve dropped out of their hearts like a little sparrow fallen from its nest.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

477. “From time to time I yawn so widely that tears roll down my cheek.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

478. “If I were ever to go on a trip, I think I should make written notes of the slightest traits of my character before leaving, so that when I returned I would be able to compare what I was and what I had become.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

479. “Mighty king, come from so far, prepared by so many combinations, by so many vanished gestures. He disappears in turn, so that other combinations can be born, other gestures, attacks, counterattacks, turns of luck, a crowd of small adventures.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

480. “He raised himself on his hands and looked at Irene’s face: the nudity of that feminine body had risen into her face, the body had reabsorbed it, as nature reabsorbs forsaken gardens.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

481. “I scraped my heel against this black claw: I wanted to peel off some of the bark. For no reason at all, out of defiance, to make the bare pink appear absurd on the tanned leather: to play with the absurdity of the world. But, when I drew my heel back, I saw that the bark was still black.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

482. “You have to talk to make sure you’re alive.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

483. “Man lives in the midst of images. Literature offers him a critical image of himself.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

484. “The words I speak are too big for my mouth, they tear it; the load of destiny I bear is too heavy for my youth and has shattered it.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

485. “I am never any one of my attitudes, any one of my actions.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

486. “And you, fathers and mothers, loving par-ents, lower your eyes humbly. They are there, your dead children, stretching their frail arms towards you, and all the happiness you denied them, all the tortures you inflicted, weigh like lead on their sad, childish, unforgiving hearts.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

487. “Faith, even when profound, is never complete. It has to be endlessly sustained or, at least, preserved from destruction.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

488. “Houses were never sanctuaries. The Gestapo often conducted their arrests between midnight and five in the morning. It appeared that at any instant the door could open, allowing a cold breath of night air to blow in, and three friendly Germans with revolvers.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

489. “Finally, it is worth mentioning, in the interest of thoroughness, that the defeat exasperated the conflict between generations. For four years the combatants of 1914 reproached those of 1940 for having lost the war, and those of 1940, in reply, accused their elders of having lost the peace.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

490. “Roquentin wonders if he could do the same as the man who wrote the tune. Not in music, but in the realm of art. Not a history book, because that is about what has existed, and existence is pointless, is not necessary.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

491. “An existant can never justify the existence of another existant.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

492. “The existentialist cannot accept that man can be helped by any sign on earth, for he will interpret the sign as he chooses.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

493. “All these objects... how can I explain? They inconvenienced me; I would have liked the to exist less strongly, more dryly, in a more abstract way, with more reserve.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre