Quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre

I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.

Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.

You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it.

Man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does.

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.

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

As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

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.

I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything.

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

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.

Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.

But for me there is neither Monday nor Sunday: there are days which pass in disorder, and then, sudden lightning like this one. Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I can't describe it, it's like the Nausea and yet it's just the opposite: at last an adventure happens to me and when I question myself I see that it happens that I am myself and that I am here; I am the one who splits in the night, I am as happy as the hero of a novel.

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.

I dreamed vaguely of killing myself to wipe out at least one of these superfluous lives. But even my death would have been In the way . In the way, my corpse, my blood on these stones, between these plants, at the back of this smiling garden. And the decomposed flesh would have been In the way in the earth which would receive my bones, at last, cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth, it would have been In the way : I was In the way for eternity.

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.

Life is a useless passion.

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

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?

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.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.

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.