Top 450 Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then anything, anything could happen.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

202. “I am illuminated within by a diminishing light.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

203. “So much torture, bloodshed, deceit. You cannot make your young people practice torture twenty-four hours a day and not expect to pay a price for it.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

204. “Man exists, turns up, appears on the scene and only afterwards, defines himself.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

205. “Yes, I am so free. And what a superb absence is my soul.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

206. “I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

207. “Every human endeavor, however singular it seems, involves the whole human race.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

208. “Therefore, in the nature of this will for freedom, which freedom itself implies, I may pass judgement on those who seek to hide from themselves the complete arbitrariness and the complete freedom of their existence.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

209. “As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

210. “Perception is naturally surpassed toward action; better yet, it can be revealed only in and through projects of action. The world is revealed as an “always future hollow”, for we are always future to ourselves.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

211. “I wanted my own words. But the ones I use have been dragged through I don’t know how many consciences.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

212. “I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

214. “I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

215. “It is better; heavier, crueler. The mouth you wear for hell.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

216. “Reflection poisons desire.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

217. “My memories are like coins in the devil’s purse: when you open it you find only dead leaves.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

218. “Remember, Orestes: you were part of my herd, you grazed in the fields along with my sheep. Your liberty is nothing but a mange eating away at you, it is nothing but an exile.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

219. “Lord, you have cursed Cain and Cain’s children: thy will be done. You have allowed men’s hearts to be corrupted, that their intentions be rotten, that their actions putrefy and stink: thy will be done.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

220. “Dostoevsky said, “If God didn’t exist, everything would be possible.” That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to. He can’t start making excuses for himself.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

221. “Criminals together. We’re in hell, my little friend, and there’s never any mistake there. People are not damned for nothing.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

222. “One does not adopt a new idea, one slips into it.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

223. “I was escaping from Nature and at last becoming myself, that Other whom I was aspiring to be in the eyes of others.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

224. “What never vary are the necessities of being in the world, of having to labor and to die there.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

225. “A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

226. “The recruit who reports for active duty at the beginning of the war can in some instances be afraid of death, but more often he is ‘afraid of being afraid’; that is, he is filled with anguish before himself.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

227. “I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

228. “What a torment it is not to be rich! It gets one into such abject situations.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

229. “My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

230. “The existentialist portrays a coward as one who makes himself a coward by his actions, a hero who makes himself heroic.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

231. “If you die, I will lie down beside you and I will stay there until the end, without eating or drinking, you will rot in my arms and I will love you as carcass: for you love nothing if you do not love everything.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

232. “Words There is no good father, that’s the rule. Don’t lay the blame on men but on the bond of paternity, which is rotten. To beget children, nothing better; to have them, what iniquity!”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

233. “There are two ways to go to the gas chamber, free and not free.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

234. “It is no longer possible to escape men. Farewell to the monsters, farewell to the saints. Farewell to pride. All that is left is men.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

235. “When I can’t see myself in the mirror, I can’t even feel myself, and I begin to wonder if I exist at all.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

236. “The more one is absorbed in fighting evil, the less one is tempted to place the good in question.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

237. “Don’t you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

238. “You see, I’m fond of teasing, it’s a second nature with me – and I’m used to teasing myself. Plaguing myself, if you prefer; I don’t tease nicely.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

239. “It is not a matter of indifference whether we like oysters or clams, snails or shrimp, if only we know how to unravel the existential significance of these foods.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

240. “People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

241. “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

242. “To keep hope alive one must, in spite of all mistakes, horrors, and crimes, recognize the obvious superiority of the socialist camp.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

243. “He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

244. “I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

245. “Man is a useless passion. It is meaningless that we live and it is meaningless that we die.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

246. “At times discreetly, at times disgustingly, I yielded to the most fatal temptation whenever I could no longer bear it: as a result of impatience, Orpheus lost Eurydice; as a result of impatience, I lost myself.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

247. “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.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

248. “It is the same: a chosen one is a man whom God’s finger crushes against the wall.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

250. “Three o’clock. Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. An odd moment in the afternoon.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre