Top 450 Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes (2023 Update)
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301. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

314. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

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

— 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. “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

323. “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

324. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

326. “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

327. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

329. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

332. “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

333. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

338. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

340. “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

341. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

344. “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

345. “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

346. “Hands don’t catch thoughts.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

347. “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

348. “So gather me up, dear, fold me to your heart – and you’ll see how nice I can be.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

349. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre