Quotes by Jean-Paul Sartre

There is no reality except in action. Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life.

Man is free rather than man is freedom.

But I cant see anything any more: however much I search the past I can only retrieve scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, nor whether they are remembered or invented.

certain details, somewhat curtailed, live in my memory. But I dont see anything anymore: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.

What sort of adventures? I asked him, astonished. ‘All sorts, Monsieur. Getting on the wrong train. Stopping in an unknown city. Losing your briefcase, being arrested by mistake, spending the night in prison. Monsieur, I believe the word adventure could be defined: an event out of the ordinary without being necessarily extraordinary.

If youre lonely when youre alone, youre in bad company.

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

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

The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse.

Be self-indulgent, and those who are also self-indulgent will like you. Tear your neighbor to pieces, and the other neighbors will laugh. But if you beat your soul, all souls will cry out.

Much more likely you’ll hurt me. Still what does it matter? If I’ve got to suffer, it may as well be at your hands, your pretty hands.

Amuse yourself, torment your desires. Drink when youre thirsty -- that would be very much too simple! If you didnt harbour a temptation eternally in your soul, youd run the risk of forgetting yourself.

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

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

Youre lucky. Im always conscious of myself —in my mind. Painfully conscious.

Commitment is an act, not a word

Id come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.

My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.

Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse.

Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man....