Quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre

Man is a useless passion. It is meaningless that we live and it is meaningless that we die.

What's done at night belongs to the night. In the daytime you don't talk about it.

Il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action… [L'être humain] n'existe que dans la mesure où il se réalise, il n'est donc rien d'autre que sa vie

If you seek authenticity for authenticity's sake you are no longer authentic.

Could hell be described as too much of anything without a break? Are variety, moderation and balance instruments we use to keep us from boiling in any inferno of excess,' whether it be cheesecake or ravenous sex?

INEZ: What's the matter? ESTELLE: I feel so queer. Don't you ever get taken that way? When I can't see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself just to make sure, but it doesn't help much.

J'étais un enfant, ce monstre qu'ils fabriquent avec leurs regrets.

That's what I must avoid: I mustn't put strangeness where there's nothing. I think that is the danger of keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything, you are on the look-out, and you continually stretch the truth.

Men get the war they deserve.

I had spent my time counterfeiting eternity.

But you looked much more like a fellow who had just realised that he has been living on ideas that don't pay.

Well, you're free without wanting to be,' he explained, 'it just happens so, that's all. But Mathieu's freedom is based on reason.' 'I still don't understand,' said Lola, shaking her head. 'Well, he doesn't care a curse about his apartment: he lives there just as he would live anywhere else, and I've got the feeling that he doesn't care much about his girl. He stays with her because he must sleep with someone. His freedom isn't visible, it's inside him.

I see the insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon.

I have been much too calm these past three years. I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.

to do something is to create existence

Happiness is not doing what you want but wanting what you do.

You talk a lot about this amazing flow of time but you hardly see it. you see a women, you think that one day she'll be old, only you don't see her grow old. But there are moments when you think you see her grow old and feel yourself growing old with her: this is the feeling of adventure.

a wise person can want nothing better from life than to pay back the wrong that has been done him.

I have no taste for work any longer, I can do nothing more except wait for night. 530: Things are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea.

If... if I didn't try to get my life moving on my own account, I should think it just absurd to go on living.' A look of smiling obstinacy had come into Marcelle's face. 'Yes, yes - it's your vice.' 'It's not a vice. It's how I'm made.' 'Why aren't other people made like that, if it isn't a vice?' 'They are, only they don't know it.

I know very well that I don't want to do anything: to do something is to create existence—and there's quite enough existence as it is.

Je pense, lui dis-je, que nous voilà, tous tant que nous sommes, à manger et à boire pour conserver notre précieuse existence et qu'il n'y a rien, rien, aucune raison d'exister… L'autodidacte répondit que la vie a un sens si on veut bien lui en donner un. Il faut d'abord agir, se jeter dans une entreprise. Il y a un but, Monsieur, il y a un but… il y a les hommes.

certain details, somewhat curtailed, live in my memory. But I don't see anything anymore: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.

This then is the age of reason.