Top 450 Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

252. “Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

253. “As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

255. “It is disgusting – Why must we have bodies?”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

258. “The revolution you dream of is not ours. You don’t want to change the world; you want to blow it up.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

259. “Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

260. “If I relegate impossible Salvation to the prop room, what remains? A whole man, composed of all men and as good as all of them and no better than any.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

262. “One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

263. “I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven’s name, why is it so important to think the same things all together.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

264. “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

265. “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

266. “Once they have slept together they will have to find something else to veil the enormous absurdity of their existence.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

268. “Acting is a question of absorbing other people’s personalities and adding some of your own experience.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

269. “Il n’y a pas d’autre univers qu’un univers humain, l’univers de la subjectivite humaine. There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

270. “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

271. “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

272. “Love was not something to be felt, not a particular emotion, nor yet a particular shade of feeling, it was much more like a lowering curse on the horizon, a precursor of disaster.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

281. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

284. “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

285. “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance. I leaned back and closed my eyes. But the images, forewarned, immediately leaped up and filled my closed eyes with existences: existence is a fullness which man can never abandon. Strange.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

288. “The Nausea has not left me and I don’t believe it will leave me so soon; but I no longer have to bear it, it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is I.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

290. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

296. “A work of art is only a page torn from a life. It expresses this life, of course, but it could have very well not expressed it. No matter, for everything has the same value, whether it be writing The Possessed or drinking a cup of coffee.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

298. “Those who conceal from themselves this total freedom, under the guise of solemnity, or by making deterministic excuses, I will call cowards. Others, who try to prove their existence is necessary, when man’s appearance on earth is merely contingent, I will call bastards.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

299. “In choosing myself, I choose man.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

300. “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