115 Most Famous Jean Paul Sartre Quotes That Will Inspire You
Are you looking for the most famous Jean Paul Sartre quotes? Then you’re in the right place. Read on, and you might just find a new perspective on life!
Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, and French writer who was a leading figure in existentialism and phenomenology.
Born in 1905, his works explored human freedom, responsibility, and existential angst. Through books such as Being and Nothingness and Nausea and plays like No Exit, Sartre challenged conventional thinking and urged readers to confront their existence.
He was also a vocal political activist, taking strong stances on issues such as Marxism and existential humanism.
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Sartre’s complex ideas and distinctive style earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, though he declined it, expressing concerns over how such recognition might compromise his independent thinking.
While he passed away over 4 decades ago, he is still one of the most important people in France. His words continue to influence modern intellectual thought and his quotes are often cited in discussions connected to understanding human existence.
If you’re a fan of his work or just want to learn more of the clever words he said, then this post will give you 115 Jean Paul Sartre quotes to ponder over!
From the famous “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself” to “Commitment is an act, not a word”, here are some of the most famous quotes by Jean Paul Sartre.
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Famous Jean Paul Sartre Quotes
So without any further ado, here are the most famous John Paul Sartre quotes.
Jean Paul Sartre Existentialism Quotes
Moshe Milner, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Since this was his most popular school of thought, it’s only right that we have a category dedicated to Jean Paul Sartre quotes about Existentialism.
1.“Existence precedes essence.”
2. “To think new thoughts you have to break the bones in your head”
3. “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”
4. “I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.”
5. “The best way to conceive of the fundamental project of human life is to see it as a series of choices.”
6. “One always dies too soon – or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.”
7. “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.”
8. “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.”
9. “I am my choices. I cannot not choose.”
10. “Nothingness haunts being.”
11. “Existence is an imperfection.”
12. “I am responsible for everything…except for my very responsibility.”
13. “Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of from 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.”
14. “One is still what one is going to cease to be, and already what one is going to become.”
15. “When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that, we also mean that in choosing for himself, he chooses for all men.”
16. “Nothingness haunts being.”
17. “Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.”
18. “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.”
19. “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
20. “People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing.”
21. “Perhaps its inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is.”
22. “All human actions are equivalent, and all are on principle doomed to failure.”
Jean Paul Sartre Quotes on Love
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre – 刘东鳌(Liu Dong’ao), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Below are some of the famous quotes by Jean Paul Sartre on love!
23. “We must act out passion before we can feel it.”
24. “We do not judge the people we love.”
25. “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.”
Inspirational Quotes by Sartre
User:T1980, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
These Jean Paul Sartre quotes will no doubt inspire you!
26. “Commitment is an act, not a word.”
27. “Man is nothing other than his own project.”
28. “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.”
29. “A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.”
30. “Man is what he wills himself to be.”
31. “We are our choices.”
32. “It is only in our decisions that we are important.”
33. “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.”
34. “To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.”
35. “An individual chooses and makes himself.”
36. “Life begins on the other side of despair.”
37. “The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.”
38. “Life has no meaning, the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.”
General Quotes from Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre seated in the middle – Alberto Korda, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Here are more quotes from Sartre you ought to know!
39. “Hell is other people.”
40. “I know only one Church: it is the society of men.”
41. “No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.”
42. “The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.”
43. “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.”
44. “I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.”
45. “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”
46. “She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.”
47. “Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”
48. “Words are loaded pistols.”
49. “I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.”
50. “The more absurd life is, the more insupportable death is.”
51. “There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.”
52. “If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.”
53. “Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.”
54. “I’m going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.”
55. “He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.”
56. “Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed because it involves all mankind.”
57. “I’d come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.”
58. “I never could bear the idea of anyone’s expecting something from me. It
always made me want to do just the opposite.”
59. “Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed because it involves all mankind.”
60. “Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.”
61. “Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of and the value of it is nothing else but the sense that you choose.”
62. “It’s just what people do when they’re getting old, when they’re sick of themselves and their life; they think of money and take care of themselves.”
63. “I’ve lived the life of a man without teeth, he thought about it. A life of a man without teeth. I’ve never bitten, I’ve been waiting, keeping myself for later – and now I’ve just ascertained that I don’t have teeth anymore.”
64. “A man rarely feels like laughing alone.”
65. “You exaggerate everything. You continually force the truth because you’re always looking for something.”
66. “It was odd, he thought, that a man could hate himself as though he were someone else.”
67. “A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing.”
68. “I had spent my time counterfeiting eternity…”
69. “It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.”
70. “Genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out.”
71. “You are — your life, and nothing else.”
72. “If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.”
73. “That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.”
74. “Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.”
75. “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.”
76. “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.”
77. “To eat is to appropriate by destruction.”
78. “Death is a continuation of my life without me…”
79. “Time is too large, it can’t be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.”
80. “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?”
81. “That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.”
82. “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.”
83. “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.”
84. “There is a universe behind and before him. And the day is approaching when closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left; he will say to himself, “now what?”
85. “I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.”
86. “Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.”
87. “You’re lucky. I’m always conscious of myself —in my mind. Painfully conscious.”
88. “As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.”
89. “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.”
Moshe Milner, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
90. “One always dies too soon — or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.”
91. “We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.”
92. “We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.”
93. “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.”
94. “It’s strange. I felt less lonely when I didn’t know you.”
95. “As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.”
96. “I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence.”
97. “Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.”
98. “It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.”
99. “The poor don’t know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.”
100. “My thought is me: that’s why I can’t stop. I exist because I think… and I can’t stop myself from thinking.”
101. “Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.”
102. “There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.”
103. “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!”
104. “It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.”
105. “I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books.”
106. “We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are – that is the fact. “
107. “Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.”
108. “When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.”
109. “That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst.”
110. “I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything.”
111. “There is only one day left, always starting over: It is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”
112. “Things are entirely what they appear to be—and behind them . . . there is nothing.”
113. “If I didn’t try to assume responsibility for my own existence, it would seem utterly absurd to go on existing.”
114. “Remember you’re not alone; you’ve no right to inflict the sight of your fear on me.”
115. “Why do you keep maintaining your ideas are right if you can’t prove them?”
Final Thoughts On The Famous Jean Paul Sartre Quotes
And there you have it! Those were some of the most famous quotes from Jean Paul Sartre!
I hope you find a quote that resonates with you, be it one of the inspirational quotes from Sartre or one about existentialism, a topic he is most famous for!
Of course, this post doesn’t include all his quotes but I believe you’ll find a Sartre quote that inspires you!
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