Top 450 Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 10

101. “Acting is happy agony.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

102. “If you begin by saying, ‘Thou shalt not lie,’ there is no longer any possibility of political action.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

103. “I am a man, Jupiter, and each man must invent his own path.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

104. “So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: Hell is other people.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

105. “With despair, true optimism begins: the optimism of the man who expects nothing, who knows he has no rights and nothing coming to him, who rejoices in counting on himself alone and in acting alone for the good of all.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

106. “You are – your life, and nothing else.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

107. “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

108. “How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

109. “The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

110. “We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

111. “This is the basis for the joy of love when there is joy; we feel that our existence is justified.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

113. “I have no religion, but if I were to choose one, it would be that of Shariati’s.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

114. “Because we can imagine, we are free.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

115. “It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

116. “Let it crumble! Let the rocks revile me and flowers wilt at my coming. Your whole universe is not enough to prove me wrong. You are the king of gods, king of stones and stars, king of the waves of the sea. But you are not the king of man.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

117. “Violence is good for those who have nothing to lose.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

118. “Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

119. “In love, one and one are one.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

120. “No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

121. “I’m going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

122. “I don’t know. Everything. Living. Smoking.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

123. “Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

124. “For the time being I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of all flabby masses which move spontaneously.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

125. “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.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

126. “L’homme est une passion inutile. Man is a useless passion.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

127. “To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

128. “Something begins in order to end: an adventure doesn’t let itself be extended it achieves significance only through its death.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

129. “Those who wants to be loved, must want the freedom of the other, because love emerges from it, if I subject it, it becomes an object, and from an object I can not receive love.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

130. “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.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

132. “I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

133. “Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

134. “I do not think therefore I am a moustache.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

135. “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.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

136. “I’d come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

138. “The Myth of Sisyphus, that it was not acceptable for the absurd person to commit suicide, but that to live, and live rebelliously, “with my revolt, my freedom, and my passion,” was the best way of both acknowledging and rejecting death.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

139. “The status of ‘native’ is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

140. “Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

141. “The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free, Aegistheus. You know it and they do not.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

142. “I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

143. “Man is abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no aim but what he sets himself.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

144. “I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

145. “Naturally, in the course of my life I have made lots of mistakes, large and small, for one reason or another, but at the heart of it all, every time I made a mistake it was because I was not radical enough.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

146. “As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

147. “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.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

149. “I will not be modest. Humble, as much as you like, but not modest. Modesty is the virtue of the lukewarm.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

150. “God is the solitude of men. There was only me: I alone decided to commit Evil; alone, I invented Good. I am the one who cheated, I am the one who performed miracles, I am the one accusing myself today, I alone can absolve myself; me, the man.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre