Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

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

I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.

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

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

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.

You know, it’s quite a job to start loving 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.

It is disgusting. Why must we have bodies?

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

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

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.

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

A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.

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.

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.

Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.

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

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

In a football match, everything is complicated by the presence of the other team.