Quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre

If I were ever to go on a trip, I think I should make written notes of the slightest traits of my character before leaving, so that when I returned I would be able to compare what I was and what I had become.

Ä°nsan?n kendi yüzünü anlayabilmesi belki de elinde deÄŸil. Belki de tek ba??ma yaÅŸad???m için böyle oluyor. Topluluk içinde yaÅŸayanlar, kendilerini, arkadaÅŸlar?na nas?l görünüyorlarsa aynalarda t?pk? öyle görmeyi öÄŸrenmiÅŸlerdir. Benim arkada??m yok. Tenimin bunca ç?plak olmas? acaba bu yüzden mi? Buna insans?z... evet insans?z doÄŸa denilebilir.

What is meant by the term existentialism? Most people who use the word would be rather embarrassed if they had to explain it, since, now that the word is all the rage, even the work of a musician or painter is being called existentialist. A gossip columnist in Clartés signs himself The Existentialist, so that by this time the word has been so stretched and has taken on so broad a meaning, that it no longer means anything at all.

You see a woman, 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.

I glance around the room. What a comedy! All these people sitting there, looking serious, eating. No, they aren't eating: they are recuperating in order to successfully finish their tasks. Each one of them has his little personal difficulty which keeps him from noticing that he exists; there isn't one of them who doesn't believe himself indispensable to something or someone.

Lo sé. Sé que nunca más encontraré nada ni nadie que me inspire pasión. Tú sabes que ponerse a querer a alguien es una hazaña. Se necesita una energía, una generosidad, una ceguera... Hasta hay un momento, al principio mismo, en que es preciso saltar un precipicio; si uno reflexiona, no lo hace. Sé que nunca más saltaré.

I do not cease to experience my being-for-others; my possibilities do not cease to "die", nor do the distances cease to unfold toward me in terms of the stairway where somebody "could" be, in terms of this dark corner where a human presence "could" hide. Better yet, if I tremble at the slightest noise, if each creak announces to me a look, this is because I am already in the state of being-looked-at.

Dostoevsky said, "If God didn't exist, everything would be possible." That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to. He can't start making excuses for himself

Unity may be achieved under a strong man, but the time comes when a people must stop looking for a savior and take responsibility for their own future.

What makes or breaks a man is not what people think of him, but what he thinks of himself.

I have never before had such a strong feeling that I was devoid of secret dimensions, confined within the limits of my body, from which airy thoughts float up like bubbles. I build memories with my present self. I am cast out, forsaken in the present: I vainly try to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.

For a consciousness to be capable of imagining…it needs to be free.

RevoluÅ£ionarul este individul care doreÅŸte s? schimbe lumea ÅŸi o dep??eÅŸte în sensul viitorului c?tre o ordine a valorilor pe care o inventeaz?.

This feeling of adventure definitely does not come from events: I have proved it. It's rather the way in which the moments are linked together. I think this is what happens: you suddenly feel that time is passing, that each instant leads to another, this one to another one, and so on; that each instant is annihilated, and that it isn't worth while to hold it back, etc., etc. (. . .) If I remember correctly, they call that the irreversibility of time.

Hands don't catch thoughts

And you, fathers and mothers, loving par-ents, lower your eyes humbly. They are there, your dead children, stretching their frail arms towards you, and all the happiness you denied them, all the tortures you inflicted, weigh like lead on their sad, childish, unforgiving hearts.

Gesti, gesti, piccole distruzioni, che cosa significano, io ho creduto che questa fosse la libertà.

L'enfer c'est les autres. aka, Hell is others. .

Impossibile, si è creature nate sotto il cielo, ecco il male.

Roquentin wonders if he could do the same as the man who wrote the tune. Not in music, but in the realm of art. Not a history book, because that is about what has existed, and existence is pointless, is not necessary.

And yet I am troubled; it would take so little to make the record stop: a broken spring, the whim of Cousin Adolphe. How strange it is, how moving, that this hardness should be so fragile. Nothing can interrupt it yet all can break it.

The Myth of Sisyphus, that it was not acceptable for the absurd person to commit suicide, but that to live, and live rebelliously, "with my revolt, my freedom, and my passion," was the best way of both acknowledging and rejecting death.

And the concert halls overflow with humiliated, outraged people who close their eyes and try to turn their pale faces into receiving antennæ. They imagine that the sounds flow into them, sweet, nourishing, and that their sufferings become music, like Werther; they think that beauty is compassionate to them. Mugs. I

Before beginning this treatise, he wanted the advice of The Baboon, his philosophy prof. "Excuse me, sir," he said at the end of a class, "could anyone claim that we don't exist?" The Baboon said no. "Goghito," he said, "ergo zum. You exist because you doubt your existence.