Jean Paul Sartre (Writer)

Every age has its own ; in every age the circumstances ofchoose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.

— Jean Paul Sartre death

He yawned. He had finished the day and he had also finished with his youth. Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism, smiling tolerance, resignation, common sense stoicism - all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life.

— Jean Paul Sartre life

We will freedom for freedom’s sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.

— Jean Paul Sartre time

What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is noto have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.

— Jean Paul Sartre war

What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?

— Jean Paul Sartre you

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

— Jean Paul Sartre kill

Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.

— Jean Paul Sartre man

To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.

— Jean Paul Sartre time

If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.

— Jean Paul Sartre literature

A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.

— Jean Paul Sartre words

What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal…. For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space.

— Jean Paul Sartre space

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

— Jean Paul Sartre believe

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

— Jean Paul Sartre hate

La naus

— Jean Paul Sartre

When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell a story: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow by too: you suddenly see people appear who speak and then go away; you plunge into stories of which you can't make head or tail: you'd make a terrible witness.

— Jean Paul Sartre time

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 society

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 time

As for the square at Meknes, where I used to go every day, it's even simpler: I do not see it at all anymore. All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words that are indivisibly bound together: a charming square at Meknes. … I don't see anything any more: 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 fiction

And we feel that the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations, promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to all that did not herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the man was walking in the night without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of dull rich prizes, and he did not make his choice.

— Jean Paul Sartre future

I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.

— Jean Paul Sartre light

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

— Jean Paul Sartre you

Ma pens

— Jean Paul Sartre

Monsieur ... I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.

— Jean Paul Sartre men

I wanted for the moments in my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. It would be just as well to try to catch time by the tail.

— Jean Paul Sartre life

As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.

— Jean Paul Sartre stories

I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.

— Jean Paul Sartre past

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

— Jean Paul Sartre nature

The past is the luxury of proprietors.

— Jean Paul Sartre past

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

— Jean Paul Sartre man

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

— Jean Paul Sartre adventure

For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, just notes, a myriad of tiny tremors. The notes know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them then destroys them, without ever leaving them the chance to recuperate and exist for themselves.... I would like to hold them back, but I know that, if I succeeded in stopping one, there would only remain in my hand a corrupt and languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even want that death: I know of few more bitter or intense impressions.

— Jean Paul Sartre death

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

— Jean Paul Sartre life

Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound and secret delirium of nature — could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it.

— Jean Paul Sartre knowledge

How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?

— Jean Paul Sartre hope

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.

— Jean Paul Sartre sea

I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it. I know I'll never jump again.

— Jean Paul Sartre love

I grasp at each second, trying to suck it dry: nothing happens which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever in myself, nothing, neither the fugitive tenderness of those lovely eyes, nor the noises of the street, nor the false dawn of early morning: and even so the minute passes and I do not hold it back, I like to see it pass.

— Jean Paul Sartre love

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.

— Jean Paul Sartre self

— Jean Paul Sartre

Nothingness haunts being.

— Jean Paul Sartre being

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 joy

I am responsible for everything ... except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being. Therefore everything takes place as if I were compelled to be responsible. I am abandoned in the world ... in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.

— Jean Paul Sartre world

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

— Jean Paul Sartre destruction

In order to make myself recognized by the Other, I must risk my own life. To risk one's life, in fact, is to reveal oneself as not-bound to the objective form or to any determined existence — as not-bound to life.

— Jean Paul Sartre life

L'existence pr

— Jean Paul Sartre existence

Je suis condamn

— Jean Paul Sartre

L'homme est une passion inutile.

— Jean Paul Sartre passion

Each human reality is at the same time a direct project to metamorphose its own For-itself into an In-itself-For-itself, a project of the appropriation of the world as a totality of being-in-itself, in the form of a fundamental quality. Every human reality is a passion in that it projects losing itself so as to found being and by the same stroke to constitute the In-itself which escapes contingency by being its own foundation, the Ens causa sui, which religions call God. Thus the passion of man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man loses himself as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion.

— Jean Paul Sartre religion

All human activities are equivalent ... and ... all are on principle doomed to failure.

— Jean Paul Sartre failure

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

— Jean Paul Sartre world

Life has no meaning a priori … It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.

— Jean Paul Sartre meaning

It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.

— Jean Paul Sartre escape

The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure nihilation of the In-itself; it is like a hole of being at the heart of Being.

— Jean Paul Sartre art

Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not. He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to recover his inner being.

— Jean Paul Sartre war

Generally speaking there is no irreducible taste or inclination. They all represent a certain appropriative choice of being. It is up to existential psychoanalysis to compare and classify them. Ontology abandons us here; it has merely enabled us to determine the ultimate ends of human reality, its fundamental possibilities, and the value which haunts it.

— Jean Paul Sartre reality

Les mouches (The Flies)

— Jean Paul Sartre lies

But [your crime] will be there, one hundred times denied, always there, dragging itself behind you. Then you will finally know that you have committed your life with one throw of the die, once and for all, and there is nothing you can do but tug our crime along until your death. Such is the law, just and unjust, of repentance. Then we will see what will become of your young pride.

— Jean Paul Sartre life

Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse.

— Jean Paul Sartre right

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

— Jean Paul Sartre fear

Admit it, it is your youth that you regret, more even than your crime; it is my youth you hate, even more than my innocence.

— Jean Paul Sartre hate

Some men are born committed to action: they do not have a choice, they have been thrown on a path, at the end of that path, an act awaits them, their act.

— Jean Paul Sartre men

They are in bad faith — they are afraid — and fear, bad faith have an aroma that the gods find delicious. Yes, the gods like that, the pitiful souls.

— Jean Paul Sartre god

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

— Jean Paul Sartre god

Yes, I am so free. And what a superb absence is my soul.

— Jean Paul Sartre soul

You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.

— Jean Paul Sartre zen

Her face seems ravaged by both lightning and hail. But on yours there is something like the promise of a storm: one day passion will burn it to the bone.

— Jean Paul Sartre passion

I felt less alone when I didn’t know you yet: I was waiting for the other. I thought only of his strength and never of my weakness. And now here you are, Orestes, it was you. I look at you and I see that we are two orphans.

— Jean Paul Sartre strength

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 work

Nicias, do you think you can erase with good deeds the wrongs you committed against your mother? What good deed will ever reach her? Her soul is a scorching noon time, without a single breath of a breeze, nothing moves, nothing changes, nothing lives there; a great emaciated sun, an immobile sun eternally consumes her.

— Jean Paul Sartre time

What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.

— Jean Paul Sartre god

Commoners are weightless. But he was a royal bon vivant who, no matter what, always weighed 125 kilos. I would be very surprised if he didn’t have a few pounds left.

— Jean Paul Sartre ya

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

— Jean Paul Sartre god

Blood doubly unites us, for we share the same blood and we have spilled blood.

— Jean Paul Sartre blood

Suppose that I wish to deserve the title of “robber of remorse” and that I place in myself all [the townspeople’s] repentence?

— Jean Paul Sartre people

But, if it will help ease your irritated souls, please know, dearly departed, that you have ruined our lives.

— Jean Paul Sartre art

It is for the sake of order that I seduced Clytemnestra, for the sake of order that I killed my king. I wanted for order to rule and that it rule through me. I have lived without desire, without love, without hope: I made order. Oh! terrible and divine passion!

— Jean Paul Sartre love

Understand me: I wish to be a man from somewhere, a man among men. You see, a slave, when he passes by, weary and surly, carrying a heavy load, limping along and looking down at his feet, only at his feet to avoid falling down; he is in his town, like a leaf in greenery, like a tree in a forest, argos surrounds him, heavy and warm, full of herself; I want to be that slave, Electra, I want to pull the city around me and to roll myself up in it like a blanket. I will not leave.

— Jean Paul Sartre war

I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.

— Jean Paul Sartre soul

He is dead, and my hatred has died with him.

— Jean Paul Sartre hatred

Jupiter: I committed the first crime by creating men as mortals. After that, what more could you do, you the murderers?Aegisteus: Come on; they already had death in them: at most you simply hastened things a little.

— Jean Paul Sartre death

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

— Jean Paul Sartre hate

The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free, Aegistheus. You know it and they do not.

— Jean Paul Sartre god

Aegistheus, the kings have another secret.... Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the Gods can do nothing against that man. It is a matter for men to handle amongst themselves, and it is up to other men — and to them alone — to let him flee or to destroy him.

— Jean Paul Sartre soul

Now I am weary and I can no longer tell good from Evil, and I need someone to show me the way.

— Jean Paul Sartre good

Jupiter: I gave you the liberty to serve me.Orestes: That is possible, but it has turned against you and there is nothing either one of us can do about it.

— Jean Paul Sartre liberty

I came to claim my kingdom and you refused me because I was not one of you. Now I am one of you, my subjects, we are bound by blood, and I deserve to be your king. Your sins and your remorse, your mighty anguish, I take all upon myself. Fear your dead no more, they are my dead.

— Jean Paul Sartre self

Remember, Orestes: you were part of my herd, you grazed in the fields along with my sheep. Your liberty is nothing but a mange eating away at you, it is nothing but an exile.

— Jean Paul Sartre art

We were too light, Electra. Now our feet press down in the earth like the wheels of a cart in its groove. Come with me, and we will walk heavily, bending under the weight of our heavy load.

— Jean Paul Sartre art

Your entire universe will not be enough to make me guilty. You are the king of the Gods, Jupiter, the king of the stones and of the stars, the king of the waves of the sea. But you are not the king of men.

— Jean Paul Sartre men

Jupiter: I am not your king, impudent larva? Who then has created you?Orestes: You. But you should not have created me free.

— Jean Paul Sartre you

I am a man, Jupiter, and each man must invent his own path.

— Jean Paul Sartre man

You are a tiny little girl, Electra. Other little girls dreamed of being the richest or the most beautiful women of all. And you, fascinated by the horrid destiny of your people, you wished to become the most pained and the most criminal ... At your age, children still play with dolls and they play hopscotch. You, poor child, without toys or playmates, you played murder, because it is a game that one can play alone.

— Jean Paul Sartre women

A propos de l'existentialisme: Mise au Point (Action, 29 December 1944)

— Jean Paul Sartre existentialism

In a word, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.

— Jean Paul Sartre world

Man cannot will unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.

— Jean Paul Sartre art

With despair, true optimism begins: the optimism of the man who expects nothing, who knows he has no rights and nothing coming to him, who rejoices in counting on himself alone and in acting alone for the good of all.

— Jean Paul Sartre self

man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.

— Jean Paul Sartre war

Huis-clos (No Exit)

— Jean Paul Sartre

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