Top 450 Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “So long as one believes in God, one has the right to do the Good in order to be moral.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

310. “An individual chooses and makes himself.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

322. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

325. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

327. “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

328. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

343. “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

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. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

347. “Be self-indulgent, and those who are also self-indulgent will like you. Tear your neighbor to pieces, and the other neighbors will laugh. But if you beat your soul, all souls will cry out.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre