“If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“I’m going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Hell is—other people!”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“We are our choices.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.”
― Jean Paul Sartre
“It’s quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don’t do it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven’s name, why is it so important to think the same things all together. ”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“You are — your life, and nothing else.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Life begins on the other side of despair.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“My thought is me: that’s why I can’t stop. I exist because I think… and I can’t stop myself from thinking. At this very moment – it’s frightful – if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.”
― Jean Paul Sarte
“Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Words are loaded pistols.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“In love, one and one are one.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the “burning marl.” Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“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 any more, I am because I think that I don’t want to be, I think that I . . . because . . . ugh!”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then anything, anything could happen.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.
But you have to choose: live or tell.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“She smiled and said with an ecstatic air: “It shines like a little diamond”,
“What does?”
“This moment. It is round, it hangs in empty space like a little diamond; I am eternal.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me,
and I have followed the source of rivers towards their
source or plunged into forests, always making for other
cities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; and
I could never turn back any more than a record can spin
in reverse. And all that was leading me where ?
To this very moment…”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“It answers the question that was tormenting you: my love, you are not ‘one thing in my life’ – not even the most important – because my life no longer belongs to me because…you are always me.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.”
― Jean Paul Sartre
“We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are – that is the fact. ”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“the worst part about being lied to is knowing you werent worth the truth”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up; I forget them almost immediately.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Man is what he wills himself to be.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“You must be like me; you must suffer in rhythm.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre