Quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.

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

Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.

It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.

I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together.

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

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

There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.

You are -- your life, and nothing else.

I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think… and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.

She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.

Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

Words are loaded pistols.

Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.

The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.