Quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre

When a man gets drunk he gets sentimental. That's what I wanted to avoid.

Oh, what a nuisance you are! I'm giving you my mouth, my arms, my whole body - and everything could be so simple...My trust! I haven't any to give, I'm afraid, and you're making me terribly embarrassed. You must have something pretty ghastly on your conscience to make such a fuss about my trusting you.

Anyhow, isn't it better to think we've got here by mistake?

Have the courage to read this book, for in the first place it will make you ashamed, and shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary sentiment.

The distance between the being and the conscience is the nothing

The rain has stopped, the air is mild, the sky slowly rolls up fine black images : it is more than enough to frame the perfect moment ; to reflect these images, she would cause dark little tides to be born in our hearts. I don't know how to take advantage of the occasion : I walk at random, calm and empty, under this wasted sky.

No doctrine is more optimistic [than existentialism], since it declares that man's destiny lies within himself.

I shall never sleep again. But then—how shall I endure my own company?

Will you do me the honour of lunching with me on Wednesday?" "With pleasure." I had as much desire to eat with him as I had to hang myself.

If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.

Celebrity, for me, equal hatred

Her smiles, her mimicries, all the words she uttered were addressed to herself through him.

To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.

Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it any more. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.

Man is fully responsible for his nature, choices and lifestyle.

I haven't any troubles, I have some money like a gentleman of leisure, no boss, no wife, no children; I exist, that's all. And that particular trouble is so vague, so metaphysical, that I am ashamed of it.

Genius is not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances.

I am free,' he said suddenly. And his joy changed, on the spot, to a crushing sense of anguish.

Outside nature, against nature, without excuse, beyond remedy, except what remedy I find within myself.

Je ne suis rien que le regard qui te voit, que cette pensée incolore qui te pense.

Lucien thought with bitter pleasure that his parents found him looking fine. "I don't exist." He closed his eyes and let himself drift: existence is an illusion because I know I don t exist, all I have to do is plug my ears and not think about anything and I'll become nothingness.

I am never any one of my attitudes, any one of my actions

Que me den algo que hacer, lo que sea! Sería preferible que pensara en otra cosa, porque en este momento estoy por representarme la comedia. Sé muy bien que no quiero hacer nada; hacer algo es crear existencia, y ya hay bastante existencia.

Once Right has taken hold of a man exorcism cannot drive it out.