Top 450 Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “One of the chief motives of artistic creation is certainly the need of feeling that we are essential in relationship to the world.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

252. “I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

253. “To whomever gives a kiss or a blow Render a kiss or blow But to whomever gives when you are unable to return Offer all the hatred in your heart For you were slaves and he enslaves you.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

254. “Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

255. “Some men are born committed to action: they do not have a choice, they have been thrown on a path, at the end of that path, an act awaits them, their act.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

256. “Either the USSR was not the country of socialism, in which case socialism didn’t exist anywhere and doubtless, wasn’t possible: or else, socialism was that, this abominable monster, this police state, the power of beasts of prey.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

257. “Thing are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

258. “I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

259. “What the painter adds to the canvas are the days of his life. The adventure of living, hurtling toward death.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

260. “For the artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is enchanted with it.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

261. “I’ve dropped out of their hearts like a little sparrow fallen from its nest. So gather me up, dear, fold me to your heart – and you’ll see how nice I can be.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

262. “I clung to nothing, in a way I was calm. But it was a horrible calm – because of my body; my body, I saw with its eyes, I heard with its ears, but it was no longer me; it sweated and trembled by itself and I didn’t recognize it any more.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

263. “Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not. He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to recover his inner being.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

264. “Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of form a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast – or else there is nothing at all.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

265. “Love or hatred calls for self-surrender. He cuts a fine figure, the warm-blooded, prosperous man, solidly entrenched in his well-being, who one fine day surrenders all to love – or to hatred; himself, his house, his land, his memories.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

266. “To eat is to appropriate by destruction.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

267. “I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

268. “I maintain that inversion is the effect of neither a prenatal choice nor an endocrinal malformation nor even the passive and determined result of complexes. It is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

269. “Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

270. “Tu n’es rien d’autre que ta vie.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

271. “For common minds have an ugly ability to perceive in the deepest and richest saying nothing but their own everyday opinion.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

272. “That’s what I must avoid: I mustn’t put strangeness where there’s nothing. I think that is the danger of keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything, you are on the look-out, and you continually stretch the truth.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

273. “The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

274. “The plight of modern man is that he is condemmed to be free.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

275. “I had spent my time counterfeiting eternity, I had understood nothing.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

276. “Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

277. “If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

279. “Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the gods can do nothing against that man.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

280. “A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

281. “What is there to fear in such a regular world?”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

282. “A human being who wakened in the morning with a queesy stomach, with fifteen hours to kill before next bedtime, had not much use for freedom.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

283. “The Intellectual is someone who meddles in what does not concern him.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

284. “Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

285. “A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

286. “Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up; I forget them almost immediately.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

287. “Men equally honest, equally devoted to their fatherland, are momentarily separated by different conceptions of their duty.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

288. “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

289. “If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.” – Jean-Paul Sartre.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

290. “Then time started flowing again and the emptiness grew larger.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

291. “Philosophy which does not help to illuminate the process of the liberation of the oppressed should be rejected.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

292. “You’re lucky. I’m always conscious of myself – in my mind. Painfully conscious.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

293. “Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

294. “So long as one believes in God, one has the right to do the Good in order to be moral.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

295. “If a Jew is fascinated by Christians it is not because of their virtues, which he values little, but because they represent anonymity, humanity without race.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

296. “Photographs are not ideas. They give us ideas.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

297. “Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

298. “An individual chooses and makes himself.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

299. “Never have I thought that I was the happy possessor of a “talent;” my sole concern has been to save myself by work and faith.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

300. “The Other is the hidden death of my possibilities.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre