Jean-Paul Sartre

All that I know about my life it seems I have learned in books.

God is absence. God is the solitude of man.

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

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

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

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

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

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

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.

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.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

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

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

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.

Everything has been figured out except how to live.

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

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

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.

You must be afraid my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.

Man is not the sum of what he has already but rather the sum of what he does not yet have of what he could have.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires I sin but I deliver myself from them, if I refuse to satisfy them they infect the whole soul.

Hell is other people.

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.

Acting is happy agony.

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

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.

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

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

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

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

It is only in our decisions that we are important.

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

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

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.

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

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

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

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.

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

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

Every existing thing is born without reason prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.

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

Words are loaded pistols.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet life is there finished: the line is drawn and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

We do not judge the people we love.

It disturbs me no more to find men base unjust or selfish than to see apes mischievous wolves savage or the vulture ravenous.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

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

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

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

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

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

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

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

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Like all dreamers I mistook disenchantment for truth.

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

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

I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

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

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

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

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

The best work is not what is most difficult for you, it is what you do best.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

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.