Top 450 Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 10

51. “To choose not to choose is still to act.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

52. “If you seek authenticity for authenticity’s sake you are no longer authentic.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

54. “Genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

55. “I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

57. “I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

58. “We are possessed by the things we possess. When I like an object, I always give it to someone. It isn’t generosity-it’s only because I want others to be enslaved by objects, not me.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

59. “A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

60. “God is absence. God is the solitude of man.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

61. “Man must be invented each day.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

62. “It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

63. “I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

64. “A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

65. “Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being – like a worm.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

66. “Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

67. “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.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

69. “When she is alone in the rooms I hear her humming to keep herself from thinking.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

70. “If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

71. “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.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

72. “Everything comes to us from others. To Be is to belong to someone.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

73. “I confused things with their names: that is belief.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

74. “The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

75. “Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

76. “This then is the age of reason.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

77. “I have nothing but contempt for you idiotic chosen ones who have the heart to rejoice when there are the damned in Hell and the poor on earth; as for me, I am on the side of men and I will not leave it.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

78. “A kiss without a moustache, they said then, is like an egg without salt; I will add to it: and it is like Good without Evil.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

79. “To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

80. “Nothingness haunts Being.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

81. “There is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

82. “It is not the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner. A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honorable form.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

83. “The more absurd life is, the more insupportable death is.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

84. “I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

86. “One could only damage oneself through the harm one did to others. One could never get directly at oneself.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

87. “In order to make myself recognized by the Other, I must risk my own life. To risk one’s life, in fact, is to reveal oneself as not-bound to the objective form or to any determined existence – as not-bound to life.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

88. “Some of these days, Oh, you’ll miss me honey.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

89. “Perhaps its inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

90. “The viable jewels of life remain untouched when man forgets his vocation of searching for the truth of his existence.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

91. “What is boredom? It is when there is simultaneously too much and not enough.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

92. “Existence is an imperfection.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

93. “I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

94. “It’s the well-behaved children that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don’t say a word, they don’t hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on, they make society pay dearly.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

96. “Atheism is a cruel long term business, and I have gone through it to the end.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

97. “Existentialism’s first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

98. “Once freedom lights its beacon in man’s heart, the gods are powerless against him.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre