Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes
-
I will not be modest. Humble, as much as you like, but not modest. Modesty is the virtue of the lukewarm.
-
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.
-
This inner revolution is realistic because it maintains itself deliberately within the framework of existing institutions; the oppressed reckon with the real situation.
-
He chooses the most feared, most hated man in order to worship him as a god, feeling sure that he is alone in perceiving the god’s secret virtues.
-
Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.
-
Yes, I am so free. And what a superb absence is my soul.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The consciousness of being betrayed is to the collective consciousness of a sacred group what a certain form of schizophrenia is to the individual…it is a form of madness.
-
I know nothing, I am neither woman nor girl; I have been living in a dream and when someone kissed me, it made me want to laugh. Now I am here before you, it seems as though I have just awakened and it is morning.
-
I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good.
-
I, for my part, do not conceive an act as having causes, and I consider myself satisfied when I have found in it not its ‘factors’ but the general themes which it organizes: for our decisions gather into new syntheses and on new occasions the leitmotif that governs our life
-
As for us, my little friend, we entered the Communist Party because we were tired of dying of hunger.
-
I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.
-
Alors, c’est ça l’enfer. Je n'aurais jamais cru... vous vous rappelez: le soufre, le bûcher, le gril... ah! Quelle plaisanterie. Pas besoin de gril, l'enfer, c'est les autres.
-
It is too early to love. We will buy the right to do so by shedding blood.
-
Similarly, individual acts of aristocratic generosity do not eliminate pauperism; they perpetuate it.
-
Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?
-
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.
-
If we must absolutely mention this state of affairs, I suggest that we call ourselves 'absent', that is more proper.
-
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.
-
Abjection is a methodological conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian epoche: it establishes the world as a closed system which consciousness regards from without, in the manner of divine understanding.
-
He is dead, and my hatred has died with him.
-
How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?