Jean-Paul Sartre

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.

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

Introspection is always retrospection.

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

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

Words are loaded pistols.

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

Man is a useless passion. It is meaningless that we live and it is meaningless that we die.

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.

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

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

As soon as there will exist for everyone a margin of real freedom beyond the production of life Marxism will have lived out its span a philosophy of freedom will take its place. But we have no means no intellectual instrument no concrete experience which allow us to conceive of this freedom or of this philosophy.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

Hell is other people.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

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. And then, next day, you didn't know what to make of it,you couldn't interpret the horror you had glimpsed the day before. Yes, you know what evil costs.

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

Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.

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.

As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

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.

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

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

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

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

Nothingness haunts Being.

In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.

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

Acting is happy agony.

There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.

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

The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

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.

I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.

We do not judge the people we love.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.

When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.

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

Once you hear the details of victory it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

Life has no meaning the moment you loose the illusion of being eternal.

Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being like a worm.

Commitment is an act, not a word.

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.

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

The appearance of the other in the world corresponds therefore to a congealed sliding of the whole universe.

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

Once freedom lights its beacon in a man's heart, the gods are powerless against him

The poor dont know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

We only become what we are by the radical and deep seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

Commitment is an act not a word.

Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.

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

One should commit no stupidity twice, the variety of choice is, in the end, large enough.

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

Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total... because it may well involve the whole world.

If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

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.

There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.

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

If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.

The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.

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

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

God is absence. God is the solitude of man.

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

If you seek authenticity for authenticity's sake you are no longer authentic.

When the rich wage war it is the poor who die.

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

The past is the luxury of proprietors.

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

Everything has been figured out except how to live.

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.

It is only in our decisions that we are important.

I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.