Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes
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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.
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She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.
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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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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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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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Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.
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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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...man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.
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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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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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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 respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.
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Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
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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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The worst of misfortunes is still a stroke of luck, since one feels oneself living when one experiences it/
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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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Either the USSR was not the country of socialism, in which case socialism didn’t exist anywhere and doubtless, wasn’t possible: or else, socialism was that, this abominable monster, this police state, the power of beasts of prey.
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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?
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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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I do not give a damn about the dead. They died for the Communist Party and the Party can decide what it wants. I practice a live man’s politics, for the living.
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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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The world is sacred because it gives an inkling of a meaning that escapes us
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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.