Top 50 Sarah Bakewell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is no traced-out path to lead man to his salvation; he must constantly invent his own path. But, to invent it, he is free, responsible, without excuse, and every hope lies within him.”

— Sarah Bakewell

2. “Ideas are interesting, but people are vastly more so.”

— Sarah Bakewell

3. “Tuna fish demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of astronomy: when the winter solstice arrives, the whole school stops precisely where it is in the water, and stays there until the following spring equinox. They know geometry and arithmetic too, for they have been observed to form themselves into a perfect cube of which all six sides are equal.”

— Sarah Bakewell

4. “Moderation sees itself as beautiful; it is unaware that in the eye of the immoderate it appears black and sober, and consequently ugly-looking.”

— Sarah Bakewell

5. “Life becomes ideas and the ideas return to life.”

— Sarah Bakewell

6. “He did write, “Women are not wrong at all when they reject the rules of life that have been introduced into the world, inasmuch as it is the men who have made these without them.” And he believed that, by nature, “males and females are cast in the same mold.”

— Sarah Bakewell

7. “Sartre proposed that all situations be judged according to how they appeared in the eyes of those most oppressed, or those whose suffering was greatest. Martin Luther King Jr. was among the civil rights pioneers who took an interest. While working on his philosophy of non-violent resistance, he read Sartre, Heidegger and the German-American existentialist theologian Paul Tillich.”

— Sarah Bakewell

8. “Each man is a good education to himself, provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close up.”

— Sarah Bakewell

9. “People did not see it as a mere dream, of the kind you wake from with a vague impression that you’ve seen something marvellous but impossible. They thought it a practical goal, albeit one to which the path would be long and difficult, with many pitfalls along the way. These pitfalls were not hard to spot. That list of beautiful, distant Communist goals.”

— Sarah Bakewell

10. “Seneca put it, life does not pause to remind you that it is running out.”

— Sarah Bakewell

11. “Either you have lived well, in which case you can go your way satisfied, like a well-fed guest leaving a party. Or you have not, but then it makes no difference that you are losing your life, since you obviously did not know what to do with it anyway.”

— Sarah Bakewell

12. “From now on, he wrote, we must always take into account our knowledge that we can destroy ourselves at will, with all our history and perhaps life on earth itself. Nothing stops us but our own free choosing. If we want to survive, we have to decide to live. Thus, he offered a philosophy designed for a species that had just scared the hell out of itself, but that finally felt ready to grow up and take responsibility.”

— Sarah Bakewell

13. “Thus, if we have spent our lives preparing to meet death like an enemy on a battlefield, we have been wasting our time. As Montaigne now put it, with a superb flourish of nonchalance, “Don’t bother your head about it”. This easy slide into acceptance became Montaigne’s favourite ploy for dealing with other discomforts and concerns, too.”

— Sarah Bakewell

14. “If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, one as much as another; but those who are aware of it are a little better off – though I don’t know. That.”

— Sarah Bakewell

15. “It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. And if one thinks over that proposition it becomes more and more evident that life can never really be understood in time because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting-place from which to understand it. There.”

— Sarah Bakewell

16. “I am my own freedom: no more, no less. This.”

— Sarah Bakewell

17. “If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry;.”

— Sarah Bakewell

18. “The manifold uncanny holds sway And nothing uncannier than man.”

— Sarah Bakewell

19. “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans, they said; so philosophy must guide your attention repeatedly back to the place where it belongs – here.”

— Sarah Bakewell

20. “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.”

— Sarah Bakewell

21. “Seneca did this too: “Place before your mind’s eye the vast spread of time’s abyss, and consider the universe; and then contrast our so-called human life with infinity.”

— Sarah Bakewell

22. “Sometimes they go to it with only one buttock.”

— Sarah Bakewell

23. “Immanuel Kant was surely closer to the truth when he wrote, three centuries later: “Out of such crooked wood as the human being is made, nothing entirely straight can be fabricated.”

— Sarah Bakewell

24. “A down-to-earth question, “How to live?” splintered into a myriad other pragmatic questions. Like everyone else, Montaigne ran up against the major perplexities of existence: how to cope with the fear of death, how to get over losing a child or a beloved friend, how to reconcile yourself to failures, how to make the most of every moment so that life does not drain away unappreciated.”

— Sarah Bakewell

25. “In Germany, Martin Heidegger turned against his former mentor Edmund Husserl, but later Heidegger’s friends and colleagues turned their backs on him. In France, Gabriel Marcel attacked Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre fell out with Camus, Camus fell out with Merleau-Ponty, Merleau-Ponty fell out with Sartre, and the Hungarian intellectual Arthur Koestler fell out with everyone and punched Camus in the street.”

— Sarah Bakewell

26. “He picked quarrels with his contemporaries, broke off personal relationships, and generally made difficulties out of everything.”

— Sarah Bakewell

27. “Like most inventions that improve human life, the printing press met with skepticism and resistance.”

— Sarah Bakewell

28. “I wanted to crunch flowering almond trees, and take bites out of the rainbow nougat of the sunset.”

— Sarah Bakewell

29. “One gets used to it, said Socrates, as those who live close to a mill do to the sound of the water-wheel turning.”

— Sarah Bakewell

30. “Virgil: “It gathers force as it proceeds.”

— Sarah Bakewell

31. “Nothing costs me dear except care and trouble,” wrote Montaigne. “I seek only to grow indifferent and relaxed.”

— Sarah Bakewell

32. “Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were the heralds of modern existentialism. They pioneered a mood of rebellion and dissatisfaction, created a new definition of existence as choice, action and self-assertion, and made a study of the anguish and difficulty of life. They also worked in the conviction that philosophy was not just a profession. It was life itself – the life of an individual.”

— Sarah Bakewell

33. “Sure enough, Sartre listened to his problem and said simply, ‘You are free, therefore choose – that is to say, invent.’ No signs are vouchsafed in this world, he said. None of the old authorities can relieve you of the burden of freedom. You can weigh up moral or practical considerations as carefully as you like, but ultimately you must take the plunge and do something, and it’s up to you what that something is.”

— Sarah Bakewell

34. “In dying, he now realized, you do not encounter death at all, for you are gone before it gets there.”

— Sarah Bakewell

35. “He weathered the disorder, oversaw his estate, assessed court cases as a magistrate, and administered Bordeaux as the most easygoing mayor in its history. All the time, he wrote exploratory, free-floating pieces to which he gave simple titles:.”

— Sarah Bakewell

36. “Thus, to use language well is about more than adding decorative twiddles; it is about moving other people to emotion and recognition. It is a moral activity, because being able to communicate well is at the heart of humanitas – of being human in the fullest way.”

— Sarah Bakewell

37. “Nietzsche wrote of certain “free-spirited people” who are perfectly satisfied “with a minor position or a fortune that just meets their needs; for they will set themselves up to live in such a way that a great change in economic conditions, even a revolution in political structures, will not overturn their life with.”

— Sarah Bakewell

38. “A certain number of years lived without money are enough to create a whole sensibility.”

— Sarah Bakewell

39. “The results were dramatic. While Huxley’s drug adventure would be mystical and ecstatic, and one of Dr. Lagache’s assistants had enjoyed prancing through imaginary meadows with exotic dancers, Sartre’s brain threw up a hellish crew of snakes, fish, vultures, toads, beetles and crustaceans. Worse, they refused to go away afterwards. For months, lobster-like beings followed him just out of his field of vision, and the facades of houses on the street stared at him with human eyes.”

— Sarah Bakewell

40. “Sartre argues that freedom terrifies us, yet we cannot escape it, because we are it.”

— Sarah Bakewell

41. “Freedom, for him, lay at the heart of all human experience, and this set humans apart from all other kinds of object.”

— Sarah Bakewell

42. “In dying, he now realized, you do not encounter death at all, for you are gone before it gets there. You die in the same way that you fall asleep: by drifting away.”

— Sarah Bakewell

43. “The great adventure of our epoch, he says, is “to discover who inhabits the world, one individual at a time.”

— Sarah Bakewell

44. “What this formula gains in brevity it loses in comprehensibility.”

— Sarah Bakewell

45. “This is why, when reading Sartre on freedom, Beauvoir on the subtle mechanisms of oppression, Kierkegaard on anxiety, Camus on rebellion, Heidegger on technology, or Merleau-Ponty on cognitive science, one sometimes feels one is reading the latest news. Their philosophies remain of interest, not because they are right or wrong, but because they concern life, and because they take on the two biggest human questions: what are we? and what should we do?”

— Sarah Bakewell

46. “Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself.”

— Sarah Bakewell

47. “With Sartre, she could easily play at losing herself, without actually losing her real-world freedom as a woman or as a writer.”

— Sarah Bakewell

48. “Seneca would have approved. If you become depressed or bored in your retirement, he advised, just look around you and interest yourself in the variety and sublimity of things. Salvation lies in paying full attention14 to nature.”

— Sarah Bakewell

49. “Nothing else can be as thoroughly about or of things as the mind is: even a book only reveals what it’s ‘about’ to someone who picks it up and peruses it, and is otherwise merely a storage device.”

— Sarah Bakewell

50. “To philosophize is to learn how to die.”

— Sarah Bakewell