Quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre

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

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.

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.

This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell.

She smiled and said with an ecstatic air: It shines like a little diamond, What does? This moment. It is round, it hangs in empty space like a little diamond; I am eternal.

Il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action. (There is no reality except in action.)

I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me, and I have followed the source of rivers towards their source or plunged into forests, always making for other cities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; and I could never turn back any more than a record can spin in reverse. And all that was leading me where ? To this very moment...

You must be like me; you must suffer in rhythm.

the worst part about being lied to is knowing you werent worth the truth

It answers the question that was tormenting you: my love, you are not 'one thing in my life' - not even the most important - because my life no longer belongs to me because...you are always me.

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?

I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.

Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up; I forget them almost immediately.

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.

Man is what he wills himself to be.

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.

I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.

You and me are real people, operating in a real world. We are not figments of each other's imagination. I am the architect of my own self, my own character and destiny. It is no use whingeing about what I might have been, I am the things I have done and nothing more. We are all free, completely free. We can each do any damn thing we want. Which is more than most of us dare to imagine.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

L'enfer, c'est les autres.

In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.

Existence is an imperfection.

To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.

There is only one day left, always starting over: It is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.