Jean-Paul Sartre
As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.
I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.
Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.
I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.
A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.
To eat is to appropriate by destruction.
Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?
You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.
Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.
Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.Collection: Silence
Before you come alive, life is nothing; it 's up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose.Collection: Giving
What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence.Collection: Peaceful
We are our choices.Collection: Choices
the worst part about being lied to is knowing you werent worth the truthCollection: Knowing
There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Men
We make our own hell out of the people around us.Collection: People
In a word, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.Collection: Struggle
Two people can form a community by excluding a third.Collection: Two
Sometimes the truth is too simple for intellectuals.Collection: Simple
We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.Collection: Inspirational
Once we know and are aware, we are responsible for our action and our inaction. We can do something about it or ignore it. Either way, we are still responsible.Collection: Our Actions
Death is a continuation of my life without me.Collection: Death
To choose not to choose is still to act.Collection: Stills
I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.Collection: Book
your judgement judges you and defines youCollection: Judging
I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved. These are honest hypotheses which take the facts into account: but I sense so definitely that they come from me, and that they are simply a way of unifying my own knowledge. Not a glimmer comes from Rollebon's side. Slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves to the rigour of the order I wish to give them; but it remains outside of them. I have the feeling of doing a work of pure imagination.Collection: Believe
It is meaningless that we are born, it is meaningless that we die.Collection: Born
Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the of it is nothing other than the sense you choose.Collection: Art
There are two kinds of existentialist; first, those who are Christian...and on the other hand the atheistic existentialists, among whom...I class myself. What they have in common is that they think that existence precedes essence, or, if you prefer, that subjectivity must be the turning point.Collection: Christian
The consciousness that says 'I am' is not the consciousness that thinks.Collection: Thinking
Every human endeavor, however singular it seems, involves the whole human race.Collection: Race
I am responsible for everything... except my very responsibility.Collection: Responsibility
So much torture, bloodshed, deceit. You cannot make your young people practice torture twenty-four hours a day and not expect to pay a price for it.Collection: Lying
[M]an is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, in other respect is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. The Existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never agree that a sweeping passion is a ravaging torrent which fatally leads a man to certain acts and is therefore an excuse. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion.Collection: Believe
The coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic.Collection: Hero
We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews.Collection: Responsibility
If you die, I will lie down beside you and I will stay there until the end, without eating or drinking, you will rot in my arms and I will love you as carcass: for you love nothing if you do not love everything.Collection: Life
We cannot withdraw our cards from the game. Were we as silent and mute as stones, our very passivity would be an act.Collection: Life
When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell a story: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow by too: you suddenly see people appear who speak and then go away; you plunge into stories of which you can't make head or tail: you'd make a terrible witness.Collection: Heads Or Tails
It would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns...It goes, it goes ... and there's no end to it. It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I.Collection: Thinking
To be responsible is to be the uncontested author of an event or thing.Collection: Events
Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse.Collection: Judging
Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.Collection: Responsibility