Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes
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Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.
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The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.
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She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.
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What do you want to do with the Communist Party? A racing stable? What good is it to sharpen a knife every day if you never use it for slicing? A party is never more than a means. There is only one objective: power.
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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.
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Criminals together. We're in hell, my little friend, and there's never any mistake there. People are not damned for nothing.
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Yes, Lord, you are innocence itself: how could you conceive of Nothingness, you who are plenitude? Your gaze is light and transforms all into light: how could you know the half-light in my heart?
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Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.
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The French bourgeois doesn’t dislike shit, provided it is served up to him at the right time.
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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.
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Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
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...man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.
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I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.
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The worst of misfortunes is still a stroke of luck, since one feels oneself living when one experiences it/
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Now I am weary and I can no longer tell good from Evil, and I need someone to show me the way.
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It is not the same thing. You are perhaps not lying, but you are not telling the truth.
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All-powerful god, who am I but the fear that I inspire in others?
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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.
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Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
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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.
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Dostoevsky once wrote: 'If God did not exist, everything would be permitted'; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse.
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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.
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It is the same thing: killing, dying, it is the same thing: one is just as alone in each. He is lucky, he will only die once. As for me, for ten days I have been killing him at every minute.
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Listen to me: a family man is never a real family man. An assassin is never entirely assassin. They play a role, you understand. While a dead man, he is really dead. To be or not to be, right?