Top 450 Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

305. “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

306. “I took everything as seriously as if I were immortal.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

307. “From these few observations we can already conclude that the real is never beautiful. Beauty is a value applicable only to the imaginary and which means the negation of the world in its essential structure.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

308. “An individual chooses and makes himself.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

323. “Oppressed with countless little daily cares, he had waited... For an act. A free, considered act; that should pledge his whole life, and stand at the beginning of a new existence.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “Respectable society believed in God in order to avoid having to speak about him.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

332. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

334. “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

335. “The simplest, most indefinable quality had too much content, in relation to itself, in its heart.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

336. “A good hanging now and then – that entertains folk in the provinces and robs death of its glamour.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

337. “Man is not only that which he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be...”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

340. “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

341. “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

342. “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

343. “These young people amaze me; drinking their coffee, they tell clear, plausible stories. If you ask them what they did yesterday, they don’t get flustered; they tell you all about it in a few words. If I were in their place, I’d start stammering. It’s true that for a long time now nobody has bothered how I spend my time. When you live alone, you even forget what it is to tell a story : plausibility disappears at the same time as friends.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

346. “At the same time, I learned that you always lose. Only the rascals think they win.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

347. “One always dies too soon – or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are – your life, and nothing else.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

349. “Those who hide their complete freedom from themselves out of a spirit of seriousness or by means of deterministic excuses, I shall call cowards; those who try to show that their existence was necessary, when it is the very contingency of man’s appearance on earth, I shall call stinkers. But cowards or stinkers can be judged only from a strictly unbiased point of view.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

350. “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