Jean-Paul Sartre

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. You are — your life, and nothing else.

—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

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

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

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

The individual’s duty is to do what he wants to do, to think whatever he likes, to be accountable to no one but himself, to challenge every idea and every person.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

Little flashes of sun on the surface of a cold, dark sea.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

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. You are — your life, and nothing else.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

—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

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

When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

The worst part about being lied to is knowing you weren’t worth the truth

—Jean-Paul Sartre

I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books.

—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

Man is what he wills himself to be.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.

—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

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

—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

Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

Existence is an imperfection.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist

—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

Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished.

—Jean-Paul Sartre