Top 450 Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

352. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

354. “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

355. “Hands don’t catch thoughts.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

356. “Anyhow, it is a definite colour: I am glad I have red hair. There is it is in the mirror, it makes itself seen, it shines. I am still lucky if my forehead was surmounted by one of those neutral heads of hair which are neither chestnut not blond, my face would be lost in vagueness, it would make me dizzy.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

360. “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

361. “This is the girl, here, this girl with a ruined look who touches me and whom I love.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

362. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

369. “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

370. “I haven’t any troubles, I have some money like a gentleman of leisure, no boss, no wife, no children; I exist, that’s all. And that particular trouble is so vague, so metaphysical, that I am ashamed of it.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

371. “What men have in common is not a “nature” but a condition, that is, an ensemble of limits and restrictions: the inevitability of death, the necessity of working for a living, of living in a world already inhabited by other men.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

372. “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

373. “I realized that there was no half-way house between non-existence and this flaunting abundance. If you existed, you had to exist all the way, as far as mouldiness, bloatedness, obscenity were concerned.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

374. “La mayor parte del tiempo, al no unirse a palabras, mis pensamientos quedan en la niebla. Dibujan formas claras y agradables, se disipan; en seguida las olvido.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

375. “In any case, if you ever leave me with a handsome man, do not tell me that you trust me because, let me warn you: that is not what will prevent me from deceiving you, if I want to. On the contrary.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

376. “Perhaps it is impossible to understand one’s own face. Or perhaps it is because I am a single man? People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

377. “Only he who knows how to speak can be silent.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

378. “The cards fall on the woollen cloth, spinning. The hands with ringed fingers come and pick them up, scratching the cloth with their nails. The hands make white splotches on the cloth, they look puffed up and dusty. Other cards fall, the hands go and come. What an odd occupation: it doesn’t look like a game or a rite, or a habit. I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can’t be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

379. “In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— Jean-Paul Sartre

381. “Every belief is a belief that falls short; one never wholly believes what one believes.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

382. “The sun was clear and diaphanous like white win. Its light barely touched the moving figures, gave them no shadow, no relief: faces and hands made spots of pale gold.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

383. “Nothingness carries being in its heart.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

384. “I would like to see the truth clearly before it is too late.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

385. “But I don’t see anything anymore: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

386. “Still, somewhere in the depths of ourselves we all harbor an ashamed, unsatisfied melancholy that quietly awaits a funeral.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

387. “I shall have to get used all over again to speaking to people without touching them.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

388. “Ah! How I hate the crimes of the new generation: they are dry and sterile as darnel.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

389. “The existent individual, as Kierkegaard defines him, is first of all he who is in an infinite relationship with himself and has an infinite interest in himself and his destiny. Secondly, the existent individual always feels himself to be in Becoming, with a task before him;.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

390. “Aku suka menyadari betapa kerasnya buku bertahan, tidak pernah mau takluk begitu saja padaku; aku jadi terpedaya, capai, tetapi aku amat menikmati ambiguitas posisiku: “mengerti tetapi tidak mengerti”.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

391. “It is the reflection of my face. Often in these lost days I study it: I can understand nothing of this face. The faces of others have some sense, some direction. Not mine. I cannot even decide whether it is handsome or ugly. I think it is ugly because I have been told so. But it doesn’t strike me. At heart, I am even shocked that anyone can attribute qualities of this kind to it, as if you called a clod of earth or a block of stone beautiful or ugly.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

392. “If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom. On the other hand, if God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuse behind us, nor justification before us. We are alone, with no excuses.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

393. “Neither sad nor gay is the desert – a boundless waste of sand under a burning waste of sky.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

394. “We still have not defined the intellectual yet: all we have are technicians of practical knowledge who either accommodate themselves to their contradiction or manage to avoid suffering from it. But when one of them becomes aware of the fact that despite the universality of his work it serves only particular interests, then his awareness of this contradiction – what Hegel called an ‘unhappy consciousness’ – is precisely what characterizes him as an intellectual.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

395. “Her smiles, her mimicries, all the words she uttered were addressed to herself through him.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

396. “We play the part of heroes because we’re cowards, the part of saints because we’re wicked: we play the killer’s role because we’re dying to murder our fellow: we play at being because we are liars from the moment we’re born.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

397. “All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

398. “The recruit who reports for active duty at the beginning of the war can in some instances be afraid of death, but more often he is ‘afraid of being afraid’; that is, he is filled with anguish before himself.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

399. “You see a woman, you think that one day she’ll be old, only you don’t see her grow old. But there are moments when you think you see her grow old and feel yourself growing old with her: this is the feeling of adventure.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

400. “I am on the same plane specific object and free subject but never the two at the same time and always the one haunted by the Other.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre