Jean-Paul Sartre's Quotes

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

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

Existence precedes and rules essence.

God is absence. God is the solitude of man.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

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.

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.

I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.

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

Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.

What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

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.

Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total... because it may well involve the whole world.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.

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

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

Commitment is an act, not a word.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.

Hell is other people.

We do not judge the people we love.

If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically.

There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

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.

Words are loaded pistols.

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

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

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

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.