Jean-Paul Sartre
The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.Collection: Time
For forty years I was conscripted by the absolute, the neurosis. The absolute is gone. There remain countless tasks among which literature is in no way privileged.Collection: Years
I clung to nothing, in a way I was calm. But it was a horrible calm—because of my body; my body, I saw with its eyes, I heard with its ears, but it was no longer me; it sweated and trembled by itself and I didn’t recognize it any more.Collection: Eye
But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place.Collection: Thinking
I admire [Samuel] Beckett, but I am totally against him. He seeks no improvement.Collection: Improvement
Criticism often takes from the tree caterpillars and blossoms together.Collection: Tree
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 help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.Collection: Regret
In Guinea I could read [Franz] Kafka. I re-discover in him my own discomfort.Collection: Guinea
What never vary are the necessities of being in the world, of having to labor and to die there.Collection: Life
I am not asking for sensational revelations, but I would like to sense the meaning of that minute, to feel it's urgency.Collection: Asking
I entered the Communist Party because its cause was just and I will leave it when it ceases to be just.Collection: Party
From the period when I wrote La Nausea I wanted to create a morality. My evolution consists in my no longer dreaming of doing so.Collection: Dream
So it comes to this; one doesn’t need rest. Why bother about sleep if one isn’t sleepy? That stands to reason, doesn’t it? 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.Collection: Sleep
As long as the writer cannot write for the two billion men who are hungry, he will be oppressed by a feeling of malaise.Collection: Writing
I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.Collection: Garden
emotion is first of all and in principle an accidentCollection: Principles
It is too early to love. We will buy the right to do so by shedding blood.Collection: Life
A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.Collection: Humility
I grow warm, I begin to feel happy. There is nothing extraordinary in this, it is a small happiness of Nausea: it spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of out time - the time of purple suspenders, and broken chair seats; it is made of white, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain. No sooner than born, it is already old, it seems as though I have known it for twenty years.Collection: Purple
The public, too, has to make an effort in order to understand the writer who, though he renounce complacent obscurity, cannot always express his new-hidden thoughts lucidly and according to accepted models.Collection: Order
The revolution you dream of is not ours. You don't want to change the world; you want to blow it up.Collection: Dream
Man's existence precedes his essenceCollection: Men
You see, I'm fond of teasing, it's a second nature with me—and I'm used to teasing myself. Plaguing myself, if you prefer; I don't tease nicely.Collection: Tease
With a little luck that epoch may arrive. I am on the side of those who think that things will go better when the world has changed.Collection: Thinking
The form [of literature] matters little to me, classical or not.Collection: Littles
Lord, you have cursed Cain and Cain’s children: thy will be done. You have allowed men’s hearts to be corrupted, that their intentions be rotten, that their actions putrefy and stink: thy will be done.Collection: Children
I am a man, Jupiter, and each man must invent his own path.Collection: Men
I should wish [Alain Robbe-Grillet] to realize that Guinea exists.Collection: Wish
I think [Alain Robbe-Grillet] a good writer, but he speaks to the comfortable bourgeoisie.Collection: Thinking
At that time [1954], as a result of political events, I was deeply preoccupied by my relations with the Communist Party.Collection: Party
The recent experiences of pocketbooks prove this. I have changed my public since my works have been published in a smaller format.Collection: Changed
I don't know. Everything. Living. Smoking.Collection: Smoking
Little flashes of sun on the surface of a cold, dark sea.Collection: Dark
My pessimism has never been flabby.Collection: Pessimism
This [service to oppressed] is the writer's task, and, if he fulfills it as he should, he acquires no merit from it.Collection: Merit
I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.Collection: Moving
One of the chief motives of artistic creation is certainly the need of feeling that we are essential in relationship to the world.Collection: Motivation
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.Collection: Thinking
To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.Collection: Spiritual
The viable jewels of life remain untouched when man forgets his vocation of searching for the truth of his existence.Collection: Men
It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.Collection: Existentialism
Existence is an imperfection.Collection: Imperfection
Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.Collection: Consciousness
An individual chooses and makes himself.Collection: Individual
The more one is absorbed in fighting evil, the less one is tempted to place the good in question.Collection: Fighting
When she is alone in the rooms I hear her humming to keep herself from thinking.Collection: Thinking
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?Collection: Mirrors
Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins.Collection: Assassins
A kiss without a moustache, they said then, is like an egg without salt; I will add to it: and it is like Good without Evil.Collection: Kissing