Quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre

As long as the writer cannot write for the two billion men who are hungry, he will be oppressed by a feeling of malaise.

We do not wish to say only that a man is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for that of all men.

The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free, Aegistheus. You know it and they do not.

Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.

Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the gods can do nothing against that man.

Everything in my past, in my training, everything that has been most essential in my activity up to now has made me above all a man who writes, and it is too late for that to change.

Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.

Introspection is always retrospection

I was escaping from Nature and at last becoming myself, that Other whom I was aspiring to be in the eyes of others.

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

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

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

Philosophy which does not help to illuminate the process of the liberation of the oppressed should be rejected.

Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the of it is nothing other than the sense you choose.

Man is condemned to be free

Man is free rather than man is freedom.

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

I do not give a damn about the dead. They died for the [Communist] Party and the Party can decide what it wants. I practice a live man's politics, for the living.

I had realized in the meantime that action too has its difficulties, and that one can also be led to it by neurosis. We are not saved by politics any more than by literature.

Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.

What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.

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

So long as one believes in God, one has the right to do the Good in order to be moral.

Respectable society believed in God in order to avoid having to speak about him.