Quotes by Jean-Paul Sartre

• Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.
• Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
• 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.
• Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.
• Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.
• 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.
• Acting is happy agony.
• Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.
• Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.
• Existence precedes and rules essence.
• Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.
• A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.
• All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.
• All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
• As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
• 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.
• If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.
• I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.
• I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.
• Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.
• I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.
• I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.
• 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.
• I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.
• Hell is other people.
• God is absence. God is the solitude of man.
• 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.
• Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.
• I confused things with their names: that is belief.
• You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.
• If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.
• It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.
• It is only in our decisions that we are important.
• Words are loaded pistols.
• For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.
• If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.
• Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?
• She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.
• That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.
• Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.
• When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.
• When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.
• What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.
• We must act out passion before we can feel it.
• We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.
• We do not judge the people we love.
• 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.
• To eat is to appropriate by destruction.
• Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
• There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
• 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.
• The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.
• Life begins on the other side of despair.
• No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.
• Life has no meaning the moment you loose the illusion of being eternal.
• Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.
• Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
• Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.
• 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.
• The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.
• Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.
• The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.
• Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
• 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.
• One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.
• 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.
• Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.
• My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.