Quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre

If I relegate impossible Salvation to the prop-room, what remains? A whole man, composed of all men and as good as all of them and no better than any.

A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

I am condemned to be free.

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

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

I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

When the rich wage war it's the poor who die.

Man is not the sum of what he has but the totality of what he does not yet have, of what he might have.

We do not judge the people we love.

The best work is not what is most difficult for you it is what you do best.

I do not believe in God his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.

There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.

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

Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total... because it may well involve the whole world.

Every age has its own poetry in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

Nothingness lies coiled at the heart of being like a worm

One does not adopt a new idea, one slips into it.