Quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre

Freedom is what we do with what is done to us

Don't be afraid; I'll keep looking at you for ever and ever, without a flutter of my eyelids, and you'll live in my gaze like a mote in a sunbeam.

The Nausea has stayed down there, in the yellow light. I am happy: this cold is so pure, this night so pure: am I myself not a wave of icy air? With neither blood, nor lymph, nor flesh. Flowing down this long canal towards the pallor down there. To be nothing but coldness.

Commitment is an act, not a word

Time gnaws and wears away; it separates; it flies. And by virtue of separation--by separating man from his pain or from the object of his pain--time cures.

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 anymore.

At an age when most children are playing hopscotch or with their dolls,you, poor child, who had no friends or toys, you toyed with dreams of murder, because that is a game to play alone.

Alors c'est ça l'enfer. Je ne l'aurais jamais cru… Vous vous rappelez : le souffre, le bûcher, le gril.. Ah quelle plaisanterie. Pas besoin de gril, l'enfer c'est les autres.

I met your father last week. Are you still interested in hearing how he is doing? Hugo: No. Karsky: It is very probable that you will be responsible for his death. Hugo: It is virtually certain that he is responsible for my life. We are even.

The recruit who reports for active duty at the beginning of the war can in some instances be afraid of death, but more often he is 'afraid of being afraid'; that is, he is filled with anguish before himself.

Temporality is obviously an organised structure, and these three so-called elements of time: past, present, future, must not be envisaged as a collection of 'data' to be added together...but as the structured moments of an original synthesis. Otherwise we shall immediately meet with this paradox: the past is no longer, the future is not yet, as for the instantaneous present, everyone knows that it is not at all: it is the limit of infinite division, like the dimensionless point.

I admire the way we can lie, putting reason on our side.

To exist is simply to he there; those who exist let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce anything from them.

I must be without remorse or regrets as I am without excuse; for from the instant of my upsurge into being, I carry the weight of the world by myself alone without anything or any person being able to lighten it.

What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?

I must wash myself clean with abstract thoughts, transparent as water.

The plight of modern man is that he is condemmed to be free.

Existentialism is no mournful delectation but a humanist philosophy of action, effort, combat, and solidarity. Man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines say what this man is before he dies, or what mankind is before it has disappeared.

Reflection poisons desire.

Oppressed with countless little daily cares, he had waited... For an act. A free, considered act; that should pledge his whole life, and stand at the beginning of a new existence.

It is the good children, Madame, who make the most terrible revolutionaries. They say nothing, they do not hide under the table, they eat only one sweet at a time, but later on, they make Society pay dearly for it!

With older people, it's quite different. They're reliable, they show you what to do, and there's solidity in their affection.

The sun is not ridiculous, quite the contrary. On everything I like, on the rust of the construction girders, on the rotten boards of the fence, a miserly, uncertain light falls, like the look you give, after a sleepless night, on decisions made with enthusiasm the day before, on pages you have written in one spurt without crossing out a word.

From the very fact, indeed, that I am conscious of the motives which solicit my action, these motives are already transcendent objects from my consciousness, they are outside; in vain shall I seek to cling to them: I escape from them through my very existence. I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the affective and rational motives of my act: I am condemned to be free.