Top 450 Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Everything that burns, everything that rips me apart, I want to suffer with my body. I’d rather have a hundred wounds, whips, poisons – than this kind of suffering in the head, this phantom of suffering, which touches me softly and caresses me without ever really hurting.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

402. “But I can’t see anything any more: however much I search the past I can only retrieve scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, nor whether they are remembered or invented.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

403. “I do not cease to experience my being-for-others; my possibilities do not cease to “die”, nor do the distances cease to unfold toward me in terms of the stairway where somebody “could” be, in terms of this dark corner where a human presence “could” hide. Better yet, if I tremble at the slightest noise, if each creak announces to me a look, this is because I am already in the state of being-looked-at.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

404. “The only being which can be called free is the being which nihilates its being.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

405. “Arriving in Paris, many English and Americans are surprised to find us less thin than they imagined. They have seen the elegant dresses that appear to be new, the suits which, from afar, still seem fashionable; rarely have they encountered that paleness of face, that bodily decline that normally signifies starvation. Their solicitude, since it has been deceived, turns to rancor: I believe that they are dismayed not to find us conforming to the pathetic image they had formed of us in advance.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

406. “Every sound comes into my ears dirty because you’ve heard it on the way.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

407. “I get up. I move through this pale light; I see it change beneath my hands and on the sleeves of my coat: I cannot describe how much it disgusts me.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

408. “Don’t you ever get taken that way? When I can’t see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself just to make sure, but it doesn’t help much.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

409. “What a torment it is not to be rich! It gets one into such abject situations.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

410. “Giacometti knows that space is a cancer on being, and eats everything; to sculpt, for him, is to take the fat off space, he compresses space, so as to drain off its exteriority.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

411. “I must wash myself clean with abstract thoughts, transparent as water.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

412. “Revolutionary man must be a contingent being, unjustifiable but free, entirely immersed in the society that oppresses him, but capable of transcending this society by his effort to change it. Idealism mystifies him in that it binds him by rights and values that are already given; it conceals from him his power to devise roads of his own. But materialism also mystifies him, by depriving him of his freedom. The revolutionary philosophy must be a philosophy of transcendence.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

413. “When a man gets drunk he gets sentimental. That’s what I wanted to avoid.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

414. “The truth is that I can’t put down my pen: I think I’m going to have the Nausea and I feel as though I’m delaying it while writing. So I write whatever comes into my mind.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

415. “Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

416. “But time is too large, it can’t be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates. That gesture, for instance, the red hand picking up the cards and fumbling: it is all flabby. It would have to be ripped apart and tailored inside.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

417. “Everything happens to every man as though the whole human race had its eyes fixed upon what he is doing and regulated its conduct accordingly.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

418. “Man is fully responsible for his nature, choices and lifestyle.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

419. “I wanted to be missed, like water, like bread, like air, by all other people in all other places.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

420. “I can’t explain what I see. To anyone. There: I am quietly slipping into the water’s depths, towards fear. I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven’s name, why is it so important to think the same things all together.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

421. “But for me there is neither Monday nor Sunday: there are days which pass in disorder, and then, sudden lightning like this one. Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I can’t describe it, it’s like the Nausea and yet it’s just the opposite: at last an adventure happens to me and when I question myself I see that it happens that I am myself and that I am here; I am the one who splits in the night, I am as happy as the hero of a novel.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

422. “We stay silent for a moment. Evening is coming on; I can hardly make out the pale spot of her face. Her black dress melts with the shadow which floods the room. I pick up my cup mechanically, there’s a little tea left in it and I bring it to my lips. The tea is cold. I want to smoke but I don’t dare. I have the terrible feeling that we have nothing more to say to one another.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

423. “Human feeling. That’s beyond my range. I’m rotten to the core.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

424. “Her eyes stare at me but she seems not to see me; she looks as though she were lost in her suffering.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

425. “To exist is simply to he there; those who exist let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce anything from them.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

426. “A little more and I would have fallen into the mirror trap. I avoided it, but only to fall into the window trap: with nothing to do, my arms dangling, I go over to the window.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

427. “My passion was dead. For years it had rolled over and submerged me; now I felt empty. But that wasn’t the worst: before me, posed with a sort of indolence, was a voluminous, insipid idea. I did not see clearly what it was, but it sickened me so much I couldn’t look at it.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

428. “Existence is a fullness which man can never abandon.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

429. “Can you justify your existence then?”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

430. “If I didn’t try to assume responsibility for my own existence, it would seem utterly absurd to go on existing.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

431. “The flesh is the pure contingency of presence.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

432. “I consented to die in his place; his life had no more value than mine; no life had value. They were going to slap a man up against a wall and shoot at him till he died, whether it was I or Gris or somebody else made no difference. I knew he was more useful than I to the cause of Spain but I thought to hell with Spain and anarchy; nothing was important.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

433. “I have never before had such a strong feeling that I was devoid of secret dimensions, confined within the limits of my body, from which airy thoughts float up like bubbles. I build memories with my present self. I am cast out, forsaken in the present: I vainly try to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

434. “I am sure that fifteen minutes would be enough to reach supreme self-contempt. No thank you, I want none of that.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

435. “Something has happened to me, I can’t doubt it any more. It came as an illness does, not like an ordinary certainty, not like anything evident. It came cunningly, little by little; I felt a little strange, a little put out, that’s all. Once established it never moved, it stayed quiet, and I was able to persuade myself that nothing was the matter with me, that it was a false alarm. And now, it’s blossoming.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

436. “They are young and well built, they have another thirty years ahead of them. So they don’t hurry, they take their time, and they are quite right. Once they have been to bed together, they will have to find something else to conceal the enormous absurdity of their existence.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

437. “You and me are real people, operating in a real world. We are not figments of each other’s imagination. I am the architect of my own self, my own character and destiny. It is no use whingeing about what I might have been, I am the things I have done and nothing more. We are all free, completely free. We can each do any damn thing we want. Which is more than most of us dare to imagine.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

438. “J’ai voulu que les moments de ma vie se suivent et s’ordonnent comme ceux d’une vie qu’on se rappelle. Autant vaudrait tenter d’attraper le temps par la queue.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

439. “The effect of any form of materialism is to treat all men – including oneself – as objects, which is to say as a set of predetermined reactions indistinguishable from the properties and phenomena that constitute, say, a table, a chair, or a stone. Our aim is exactly to establish the human kingdom as a set of values distinct from the material world.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

440. “Unity may be achieved under a strong man, but the time comes when a people must stop looking for a savior and take responsibility for their own future.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

441. “My existence began to worry me seriously. Was I not a simple spectre?”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

442. “I felt that the success of the enterprise was in my hands: the moment had an obscure meaning which had to be trimmed and perfected; certain motions had to be made, certain words spoken: I staggered under the weight of my responsibility.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

443. “All was fullness and all was active, there was no weakness in time, all, even the least perceptible stirring, was made of existence. And all these existents which bustled about this tree came from nowhere and were going nowhere.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

444. “There is something I longed for more than all the rest – without realizing it properly. It wasn’t love, heaven forbid, nor glory, nor wealth. It was... anyway, I had imagined that at certain moments my life could take on a rare and precious quality.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

445. “No, my child, these things are impossible. It would have been better if she had recognize the truth courageously. She would have suffered once, then time would have erased with its sponge. There is nothing like looking things in the face, believe me.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

446. “When she was in Djibouti and I was in Aden, and I used to go and see her for twenty-four hours, she managed to multiply the misunderstandings between us until there were exactly sixty minutes before I had to leave; sixty minutes, just long enough to make you feel the seconds passing one by one.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

447. “I marvel at these young people: drinking their coffee, they tell clear, plausible stories. If they are asked what they did yesterday, they aren’t embarrassed: they bring you up to date in a few words. If I were in their place, I’d fall over myself. It’s true that no one has bothered about how I spend my time for a long while. When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell something: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

448. “Anny hasn’t changed her letter paper, I wonder if she still buys it at the little stationer’s in Piccadilly. I think that she has also kept her coiffure, her heavy blonde locks she didn’t want to cut. She must struggle patiently in front of mirrors to save her face: it isn’t vanity or fear of growing old; she wants to stay as she is, just as she is. Perhaps this is what I liked best in her, this austere loyalty to her most insignificant features.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

449. “I was neither a grandfather, nor a father, nor even a husband. I didn’t vote, I scarcely paid any taxes; I couldn’t lay claim to the rights of a tax-payer, nor to those of an elector, nor even to the humble right to honour which twenty years of obedience confer on an employee. My existence was beginning to cause me serious concern. Was I a mere figment of the imagination?”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

450. “In irony a man annihilates what he posits within one and the same act; he leads us to believe in order not to be believed; he affirms to deny and denies to affirm; he creatives a positive object but it has no being other than its nothingness.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre