JSJean-Paul Sartre

156 collected words

Jean-Paul Sartre

Life dates: 1905 AD — 1980 AD

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01c. 1942 AD

Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face. Or perhaps it is because I am a single man? 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?

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02c. 1942 AD

I've lived the life of a man without teeth, he thought about it. A life of a man without teeth. I've never bitten, I've been waiting, keeping myself for later - and now I've just ascertained that I don't have teeth anymore.

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03c. 1942 AD

The first crime was mine: I committed it when I made man mortal. Once I had done that, what was left for you, poor human murderers, to do? To kill your victims? But they already had the seed of death in them; all you could do was to hasten its fruition by a year or two.

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04c. 1942 AD

What's done at night belongs to the night. In the daytime you don't talk about it.

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05c. 1942 AD

emotion is first of all and in principle an accident

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06c. 1942 AD

My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think...and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment, it's frightful, if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: the hatred, the disgust of existing, there are as many ways to make myself exist, to thrust myself into existence. Thoughts are born at the back of me, like sudden giddiness, I feel them being born behind my head...if I yield, they're going to come round in front of me, between my eyes, and I always yield, the thought grows and grows and there it is, immense, filling me completely and renewing my existence.

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07c. 1942 AD

Concha would cry when she found out I was dead, she should have no taste for life for months afterward. But I was still the one who was going to die. I thought of her soft, beautiful eyes. when she looked at me something passed her to me. But I knew it was over: if she looked at me now the look would stay in her eyes, it wouldn't reach me. I was alone

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08c. 1942 AD

Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it any more. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.

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09c. 1942 AD

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?

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10c. 1942 AD

So you realized that there were always women in tears, or a red-headed man, or something else to spoil your effects?""Yes, naturally.

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11c. 1942 AD

The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

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12c. 1942 AD

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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13c. 1942 AD

I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me,and I have followed the source of rivers towards theirsource or plunged into forests, always making for othercities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; andI could never turn back any more than a record can spinin reverse. And all that was leading me where ?To this very moment...

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14c. 1942 AD

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.

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15c. 1942 AD

Nothingness haunts Being.

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16c. 1942 AD

There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.

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17c. 1942 AD

A little more and I would have fallen into the mirror trap. I avoided it, but only to fall into the window trap: with nothing to do, my arms dangling, I go over to the window.

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18c. 1942 AD

Existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him.

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19c. 1942 AD

I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.

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20c. 1942 AD

[E]very man ought to say to himself, "Am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?

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21c. 1942 AD

You didn't succeed. Well, what of that? There's nothing to prove, you know, and the revolution's not a question of virtue but of effectiveness. There is no heaven. There's work to be done, that's all. And you must do what you're cut out for; all the better if it comes easy to you. The best work is not the work that takes the most sacrifice. It's the work in which you can best succeed.

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22c. 1942 AD

...freedom only gives you something to be sorry for.

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23c. 1942 AD

Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.

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24c. 1942 AD

Existentialism is no mournful delectation but a humanist philosophy of action, effort, combat, and solidarity. Man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines say what this man is before he dies, or what mankind is before it has disappeared.

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