Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.

I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.

Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself.

When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.

God is absence. God is the solitude of man.

What is boredom? It is when there is simultaneously too much and not enough.

Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.

Ideas come in pairs and they contradict one another; their opposition is the principal engine of reflection.

You take souls for vegetables.... The gardener can decide what will become of his carrots but no one can choose the good of others for them.

What I regretted in La Nausee was not to have put myself completely into the thing. I remained outside my hero's disease, protected by my neurosis which, through writing, gave me happiness.

I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.

To keep hope alive one must, in spite of all mistakes, horrors, and crimes, recognize the obvious superiority of the socialist camp.

You must be like me; you must suffer in rhythm.

Why do you keep maintaining your ideas are right if you can't prove them?

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

There is a universe behind and before him. And the day is approaching when closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left; he will say to himself, "now what?

When I can't see myself in the mirror, I can't even feel myself, and I begin to wonder if I exist at all.

What the painter adds to the canvas are the days of his life. The adventure of living, hurtling toward death.

We cannot withdraw our cards from the game. Were we as silent and mute as stones, our very passivity would be an act.

When we love animals and children too much, we love them at the expense of men.

Once we know and are aware, we are responsible for our action and our inaction. We can do something about it or ignore it. Either way, we are still responsible.

When she is alone in the rooms I hear her humming to keep herself from thinking.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.

If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

Man must be invented each day

I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence

To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.

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.

The more one is absorbed in fighting evil, the less one is tempted to place the good in question.

We are possessed by the things we possess. When I like an object, I always give it to someone. It isn't generosity-it's only because I want others to be enslaved by objects, not me.

Two people can form a community by excluding a third.

Time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.

Originally, poetry creates the myth, while the prose-writer draws its portrait.

Man is abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no aim but what he sets himself.

So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: Hell is other people.

Atheism is a cruel long term business, and I have gone through it to the end.

Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins.

Life gave me everything I asked If all I asked was not a great deal, that's my problem!

Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.

I have no religion, but if I were to choose one, it would be that of Shariati's.

As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

It is the same: a chosen one is a man whom God's finger crushes against the wall.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'.

Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.

The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

It is meaningless that we are born, it is meaningless that we die.

It is always more valuable to report the truth.