Quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre

what we might call everyday morality is exclusive of ethical anguish.

This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, 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.

What men have in common is not a nature but a condition, that is, an ensemble of limits and restrictions: the inevitability of death, the necessity of working for a living, of living in a world already inhabited by other men.

An existant can never justify the existence of another existant.

Das Leben hat a priori keinen Sinn. Ehe Sie leben, ist das Leben nichts; es liegt bei Ihnen, ihm einen Sinn zu verleihen, und der Wert ist nichts anderes als der Sinn, den Sie wählen.

I want no secrets or soul-states, nothing ineffable; I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.

You believe that you believe, but you don't believe.

Amuse yourself, torment your desires. Drink when you're thirsty -- that would be very much too simple! If you didn't harbour a temptation eternally in your soul, you'd run the risk of forgetting yourself.

The idea is still there, unnameable. It waits, peacefully. Now it seems to say: "Yes? Is that what you wanted? Well, that's exactly what you've never had (remember you fooled yourself with words, you called the glitter of travel, the love of women, quarrels, and trinkets adventure) and this is what you'll never have—and no one other than yourself." But Why? WHY?

I would like to see the truth clearly before it is too late.

they dam up the future. As long as you stay between these walls, whatever happens must happen to the right or the left of the stove...Thus these objects serve at least to fix the limits of probability.

My existence began to worry me seriously. Was I not a simple spectre?

This sun and blue sky were only a snare. This is the hundredth time I've let myself be caught. My memories are like coins in the devil's purse: when you open it you find only dead leaves.

This instant which I cannot leave, which locks me in and limits me on every side, this instant I am made of will be no more than a confused dream.

Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face ... People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked? You might say -- yes you might say, nature without humanity.

I was there, standing in front of a window whose panes had a definite refraction index. But what feeble barriers! 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.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

After all, she is lucky. I have been much too calm these past three years. I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity. I leave.

In the distance. Above my head; above my head; and this instant which I cannot leave, which locks me in and limits me on every side, this instant I am made of will be no more than a confused dream.

I thought I saw Anny smiling. I try to refresh my memory: I need to feel all the tenderness that Anny inspires; it is there, this tenderness, it is near me, only asking to be born. But the smile does not return: it is finished. I remain dry and empty.

But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence.

the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.

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.

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