Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

French existentialist philosopher (1905–1980)

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980), normally known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre, was a French existentialist philosopher, dramatist and screenwriter, novelist, and critic. He had an enduring personal relationship with fellow philosopher Simone de Beauvoir.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Pen Names: Jacques Guillemin

Alternative Names: Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre • Jean Paul Sartre • J.P. Sartre • J.-P. Sartre • Sartre

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Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think any more, I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I . . . because . . . ugh!

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

"So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is — other people!"

I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.

Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.

I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then anything, anything could happen.

This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.
But you have to choose: live or tell.

"She smiled and said with an ecstatic air: "It shines like a little diamond",
"What does?"
"This moment. It is round, it hangs in empty space like a little diamond; I am eternal.

Il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action.

(There is no reality except in action.)

I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me,
and I have followed the source of rivers towards their
source or plunged into forests, always making for other
cities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; and
I could never turn back any more than a record can spin
in reverse. And all that was leading me where ?
To this very moment...

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

the worst part about being lied to is knowing you werent worth the truth

People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?