Quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre

Perhaps its inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is.

I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'.

The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.

He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.

Death is a continuation of my life without me...

INEZ: Prove it. Prove it was no dream. It's what one does, and nothing else, that shows the stuff one's made of. GARCIN: I died too soon. I wasn't allowed time to - to do my deeds. INEZ: One always dies too soon - or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are - your life, and nothing else.

I am myself and I am here.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.

Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.

Nothingness haunts Being.

Get this into your head: if violence were only a thing of the future, if exploitation and oppression never existed on earth, perhaps displays of nonviolence might relieve the conflict. But if the entire regime, even your nonviolent thoughts, is governed by a thousand-year old oppression, your passiveness serves no other purpose but to put you on the side of the oppressors.

What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterward.

I've dropped out of their hearts like a little sparrow fallen from its nest. So gather me up, dear, fold me to your heart – and you'll see how nice I can be.

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

A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness...and suddenly the "I" pales, pales, and fades out.

People. You must love people. Men are admirable. I want to vomit—and suddenly, there it is: the Nausea

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.

People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing.

The consciousness that says 'I am' is not the consciousness that thinks.

What is important is not what happens to us, but how we respond to what happens to us.

She suffers as a miser. She must be miserly with her pleasures, as well. I wonder if sometimes she doesn't wish she were free of this monotonous sorrow, of these mutterings which start as soon as she stops singing, if she doesn't wish to suffer once and for all, to drown herself in despair. In any case, it would be impossible for her: she is bound.

A madman's ravings are absurd in relation to the situation in which he finds himself, but not in relation to his madness.

In the state I was in, if someone had come and told me I could go home quietly, that they would leave me my life whole, it would have left me cold: several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.