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Jean-Paul Sartre
234 quotes
“Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: L'imagination (Imagination: A Psychological Critique) (1936)
“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.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: L'âge de raison (The Age of Reason) (1945)
“He yawned. He had finished the day and he had also finished with his youth. Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism, smiling tolerance, resignation, common sense stoicism - all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: L'âge de raison (The Age of Reason) (1945)
“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?”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) first seen 1948 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Orphée Noir (Black Orpheus)" preface, Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poésie Nègre et Malgache (1948)
“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.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the Execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg," Libération (22 June 1953)
“Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Existentialism and Human Emotions (1957)
“To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Existentialism and Human Emotions (1957)
“If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview (1960), Quoted in Susan Sontag's introduction to Barthes: Selected Writings, "Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes," (1982)
“A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Refusing the Nobel Prize, New York Times (22 October 1964)
“What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal.... For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Alberto Giacometti's work, Situations, in Braziller (1965)
“She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Words (1964), speaking of his grandmother.
“I hate victims who respect their executioners.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Loser Wins (Les Séquestrés d'Altona: A Play in Five Acts) (1960)
“You know how much I admire Che Guevara. In fact, I believe that the man was not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age: as a fighter and as a man, as a theoretician who was able to further the cause of revolution by drawing his theories from his personal experience in battle.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Marianne Alexandre (ed.), !Viva Che!: Contributions in Tribute to Ernesto 'Che' Guevara (1968)
“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.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As for the square at Meknes, where I used to go every day, it's even simpler: I do not see it at all anymore. All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words that are indivisibly bound together: a charming square at Meknes. ... I don't see anything any more: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And we feel that the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations, promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to all that did not herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the man was walking in the night without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of dull rich prizes, and he did not make his choice.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ma pensée, c'est moi: voilà pourquoi je ne peux pas m'arrêter. J'existe parce que je pense ... et je ne peux pas m'empêcher de penser.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Monsieur ... I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wanted for the moments in my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. It would be just as well to try to catch time by the tail.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The past is the luxury of proprietors.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, just notes, a myriad of tiny tremors. The notes know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them then destroys them, without ever leaving them the chance to recuperate and exist for themselves.... I would like to hold them back, but I know that, if I succeeded in stopping one, there would only remain in my hand a corrupt and languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even want that death: I know of few more bitter or intense impressions.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound and secret delirium of nature — could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it. I know I'll never jump again.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I grasp at each second, trying to suck it dry: nothing happens which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever in myself, nothing, neither the fugitive tenderness of those lovely eyes, nor the noises of the street, nor the false dawn of early morning: and even so the minute passes and I do not hold it back, I like to see it pass.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tout existant naît sans raison, se prolonge par faiblesse et meurt par rencontre.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothingness haunts being.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am responsible for everything ... except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being. Therefore everything takes place as if I were compelled to be responsible. I am abandoned in the world ... in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To eat is to appropriate by destruction.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 237, 1998 edition
“L'existence précède et commande l'essence.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Je suis condamné à être libre.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“L'homme est une passion inutile.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All human activities are equivalent ... and ... all are on principle doomed to failure.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure nihilation of the In-itself; it is like a hole of being at the heart of Being.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source