Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes
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301. “In choosing myself, I choose man.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

302. “I am not asking for sensational revelations, but I would like to sense the meaning of that minute, to feel it’s urgency...”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

303. “We have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

304. “Everything is silent again: but it isn’t the same silence. It’s raining: tapping lightly against the frosted glass windows; if there are any more masked children in the street, the rain is going to spoil their cardboard masks.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

305. “Don’t be afraid; I’ll keep looking at you for ever and ever, without a flutter of my eyelids, and you’ll live in my gaze like a mote in a sunbeam.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

306. “Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

307. “The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose, not his individuality, but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

308. “A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

309. “I committed the first crime by creating men as mortals. After that, what more could you do, you the murderers? Come on; they already had death in them: at most you simply hastened things a little.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

310. “It’s just what people do when they’re getting old, when they’re sick of themselves and their life; they think of money and take care of themselves.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

311. “I enjoy feeling fastidious and aloof. I enjoy saying no, always no, and I should be afraid of any attempt to construct a finally habitable world, because I should merely have to say – Yes; and act like other people.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

312. “An individual chooses and makes himself.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

313. “Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom-ah the soul-destroying boredom-of long days of mild content.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

314. “I know only one Church: it is the society of men.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

315. “Outside nature, against nature, without excuse, beyond remedy, except what remedy I find within myself.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

316. “Time gnaws and wears away; it separates; it flies. And by virtue of separation – by separating man from his pain or from the object of his pain – time cures.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

317. “This is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free: condemned, because he did not create himself, yet nonetheless free, because once cast into the world, he is responsible for everything that he does.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

318. “But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

319. “It is always more valuable to report the truth.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

321. “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

322. “Abjection is a methodological conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian epoche: it establishes the world as a closed system which consciousness regards from without, in the manner of divine understanding.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

323. “Hands don’t catch thoughts.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

324. “Man is always a wizard to man, and the social world is at first magical.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

326. “There it is: I am gently slipping into the water’s depths, towards fear.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

327. “My eyes feel all soft, all soft as flesh. I’m going to sleep.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

328. “We do not wish to say only that a man is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for that of all men.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

329. “Temporality is obviously an organised structure, and these three so-called elements of time: past, present, future, must not be envisaged as a collection of ‘data’ to be added together... but as the structured moments of an original synthesis. Otherwise we shall immediately meet with this paradox: the past is no longer, the future is not yet, as for the instantaneous present, everyone knows that it is not at all: it is the limit of infinite division, like the dimensionless point.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

330. “I liked this shop very much, it has a cynical and obstinate look, it insolently recalled the rights of dirt and vermin, only two paces from the most costly church in France.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

331. “The distance between the being and the conscience is the nothing.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

332. “It is too early to love. We will buy the right to do so by shedding blood.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

333. “Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

334. “Everything in my past, in my training, everything that has been most essential in my activity up to now has made me above all a man who writes, and it is too late for that to change.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

335. “I feel there are no more perfect moments. I feel it in my legs when I walk. I feel it all the time, even when I sleep. I can’t forget it. I am dazzled, uncomfortable, I can’t get used to it.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

336. “There are two ways of destroying a people. Either condemn them en bloc or force them to repudiate the leaders they adopted. The second is the worse.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

337. “Paris was dead. More cars, more pedestrians – except at certain hours in certain quarters. We walked between the cobblestones; it appeared that we were the forgotten members of an immense exodus. A bit of provincial life was caught on the sharp angles of the capital; it remained a skeleton city, pompous and immobile, too long and too big for us: too large, the streets that we discovered as far as the eye could see, too great the distances, too vast the perspectives: we got lost.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

338. “I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

339. “To forget about the others? How utterly absurd! I feel you there, in every pore. Your silence clamors in my ears. You can nail up your mouth, cut your tongue out – but you can’t prevent your being there.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

340. “She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

341. “And you know what wickedness is, and shame, and fear. There were days when you peered into yourself, into the secret places of your heart, and what you saw there made you faint with horror.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

342. “All-powerful god, who am I but the fear that I inspire in others?”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

343. “Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

344. “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

345. “And yet I am troubled; it would take so little to make the record stop: a broken spring, the whim of Cousin Adolphe. How strange it is, how moving, that this hardness should be so fragile. Nothing can interrupt it yet all can break it.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

346. “Why do you keep maintaining your ideas are right if you can’t prove them?”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

347. “The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

348. “From the very fact, indeed, that I am conscious of the motives which solicit my action, these motives are already transcendent objects from my consciousness, they are outside; in vain shall I seek to cling to them: I escape from them through my very existence. I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the affective and rational motives of my act: I am condemned to be free.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

350. “And then, tired out by all the shouting, I always simply went to bed. Today I’m doing it to feel the pleasure you don’t yet know, of turning abruptly from friendship to love, from strength to tenderness. Tonight I love you in a way that you have not known in me: I am neither worn down by travels nor wrapped up in the desire for your presence. I am mastering my love for you and turning it inwards as a constituent element of myself.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre