Quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre

We have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is.

Tu eÈ™ti pentru mine relaÈ›ia necesar?. ToÈ›i ceilalÈ›i sunt întâmpl?tori.

What a torment it is not to be rich! It gets one into such abject situations.

All of a sudden something breaks off sharply. The adventure is over, time resumes its daily routine. I turn; behind me, this beautiful melodious form sinks entirely into the past. It grows smaller, contracts as it declines, and now the end makes one with the beginning.

And every man ought to say to himself, "Am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?" And if he does not say that to himself, he is masking his anguish. There is no question here of the kind of anguish which would lead to quietism, to inaction. It is a matter of a simple sort of anguish that anybody who has had responsibilities is familiar with.

You are what you are not and are not what you are.

Faire souffrir c'est posséder et créer tout autant que détruire.

Wait a minute, there's a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why, now, should it be disagreeable?...Ah,I see; it's life without a break.

Do you regret those days?' 'No,' replied Marcelle acidly: 'but I regret the life I might have had.

Me gustaría tanto abandonarme, olvidarme, dormir. Pero no puedo, me sofoco: la existencia me penetra por todas partes, por los ojos, por la nariz, por la boca... Y de golpe, de un sólo golpe, el velo se desgarra, he comprendido, he visto.

I don't know where to go, I stay planted in front of the cardboard chef. I don't need to turn around to know they are watching me through the windows: they are watching my back with surprise and disgust; they thought I was like them, that I was a man, and I deceived them. I suddenly lost the appearance of a man and they saw a crab running backwards out of this human room. Now the unmasked intruder has fled: the show goes on.

Faire, et en faisant se faire et n'être rien que ce qu'on fait

No, my child, these things are impossible. It would have been better if she had recognize the truth courageously. She would have suffered once, then time would have erased with its sponge. There is nothing like looking things in the face, believe me.

You complain because things don't arrange themselves around you like a bouquet of flowers, without your taking the slightest trouble to do anything. But I have never asked as much: I wanted action. You know, when we played adventurer and adventuress: you were the one who had adventures, I was the one who made them happen.

You didn't succeed. Well, what of that? There's nothing to prove, you know, and the revolution's not a question of virtue but of effectiveness. There is no heaven. There's work to be done, that's all. And you must do what you're cut out for; all the better if it comes easy to you. The best work is not the work that takes the most sacrifice. It's the work in which you can best succeed.

I'm not obstinate, I'm highly strung: I don't know how to let myself go. I must always think of what is happening to me - it's a form of self-protection.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance. I leaned back and closed my eyes. But the images, forewarned, immediately leaped up and filled my closed eyes with existences: existence is a fullness which man can never abandon. Strange

You have to aspire to everything to have hopes of doing something.

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.

God is absence. God is the solitude of man.

The most clear-sided view of the darkest possible situation is itself an act of optimism

je prenais tout au sérieux, comme si j'avais été immortel.

Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face. Or perhaps it is because I am a single man? People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?

If God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimise our behaviour.