Jean-Paul Sartre
Criminals together. We're in hell, my little friend, and there's never any mistake there. People are not damned for nothing.Collection: Mistake
Hell is for other people.Collection: People
Words There is no good father, that's the rule. Don't lay the blame on men but on the bond of paternity, which is rotten. To beget children, nothing better; to have them, what iniquity!Collection: Children
Listen to me: a family man is never a real family man. An assassin is never entirely assassin. They play a role, you understand. While a dead man, he is really dead. To be or not to be, right?Collection: Real
I have nothing but contempt for you idiotic chosen ones who have the heart to rejoice when there are the damned in Hell and the poor on earth; as for me, I am on the side of men and I will not leave it.Collection: Heart
Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.Collection: Assassins
I do not understand! I understand nothing! I cannot understand nor do I want to understand! I want to believe! To Believe!Collection: Believe
To love is never just to love since it is also to will to love, and ... to love in spite of oneself, to allow oneself to be overcome by one's love.Collection: Love Is
Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of form a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all.Collection: Distance
This then is the age of reason.Collection: Age
One could only damage oneself through the harm one did to others. One could never get directly at oneself.Collection: Damage
A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing.Collection: Men
I am finishing a biography of [Gustave] Flaubert. Because he is the opposite of what I am. One needs to rub up against argument.Collection: Opposites
Many young people today do not concern themselves with style. They think that what one says should be said simply and that is all. For me, style - which does not exclude simplicity, quite the opposite - is above all a way of saying three or four things in one. There is the simple sentence, with its immediate meaning, and then at the same time, below this immediate meaning, other meanings are organized. If one is not capable of giving language this plurality of meaning, then it is not worth the trouble to write.Collection: Writing
The world would get along very well without literature. It would get along even better without man.Collection: Men
What's done at night belongs to the night. In the daytime you don't talk about it.Collection: Night
There it is: I am gently slipping into the water's depths, towards fear.Collection: Water
The plight of modern man is that he is condemmed to be free.Collection: Men
Originally, poetry creates the myth, while the prose-writer draws its portrait.Collection: Writing
Time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.Collection: Filled Up
All I want is' - and he uttered the final words through clenched teeth and with a sort of shame - 'to retain my freedom.' I should myself have thought,' said Jacques, 'that freedom consisted in frankly confronting situations into which one had deliberately entered, and accepting all one's responsibilities. But that, no doubt, is not your view.Collection: Responsibility
I do not give a damn about the dead. They died for the [Communist] Party and the Party can decide what it wants. I practice a live man's politics, for the living.Collection: Party
If I did not publish this autobiography [Les Mots] sooner and in its most radical form, it is because I considered it exaggerated.Collection: Form
As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.Collection: Truth
Everything is gratuitous, this garden, this city and myself. When you suddenly realize it, it makes you feel sick and everything begins to drift . . . that's nausea.Collection: Garden
Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound and secret delirium of nature — could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it.Collection: Ignorance
I am not recommending "popular" literature which aims at the lowest.Collection: Literature
If a Jew is fascinated by Christians it is not because of their virtues, which he values little, but because they represent anonymity, humanity without race.Collection: Christian
it was odd, he thought, that a man could hate himself as though he were someone else.Collection: Hate
When one loves animals and children too much, one loves them against human beings.Collection: Children
Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes essence.Collection: Essence
The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose, not his individuality, but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him.Collection: Support
L'homme est condamne a' e" tre libre. Man is condemned to be free.Collection: Men
Your scare me rather. My reflection in the glass never did that; of course, I knew it so well. Like something I had tamed...I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.Collection: Reflection
A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.Collection: Mean
I have seen children dying of hunger. Over against a dying child La Nausee cannot act as a counterweight.Collection: Children
On my way to the office in the morning, there are, in front of me, behind me, other men going to their jobs. I see them; if I dared, I would smile at them. I think to myself that I am a socialist, that they are the purpose of my life, of my efforts and that they do not know it yet.Collection: Morning
Respectable society believed in God in order to avoid having to speak about him.Collection: God
She suffers as a miser. She must be miserly with her pleasures, as well. I wonder if sometimes she doesn't wish she were free of this monotonous sorrow, of these mutterings which start as soon as she stops singing, if she doesn't wish to suffer once and for all, to drown herself in despair. In any case, it would be impossible for her: she is bound.Collection: Singing
Men equally honest, equally devoted to their fatherland, are momentarily separated by different conceptions of their duty.Collection: Men
There are photographers who push for war because they make stories. They search for a Chinese who has a more Chinese are than the others and they end up finding one. They have him take a typically Chinese pose and surround him with chinoiseries. What have they captured on their film? A Chinese? Definitely not: the idea of the Chinese.Collection: War
Outside nature, against nature, without excuse, beyond remedy, except what remedy I find within myself.Collection: Excuse
For the artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is enchanted with it.Collection: Artist
A madman's ravings are absurd in relation to the situation in which he finds himself, but not in relation to his madness.Collection: Madness
I wanted my own words. But the ones I use have dragged through I don't know how many consciences.Collection: Use
There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.Collection: Existentialism
So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: Hell is other people.Collection: Fire