Quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre

In love, one and one are one.

It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.

Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.

Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.

I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.

Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.

Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.

Before you come alive, life is nothing; it 's up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

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

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

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

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.

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

Handing over a bank note is enough to make a bicycle belong to me, but my entire life is needed to realize this possession.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

Two people can form a community by excluding a third.

I know only one Church: it is the society of men.

What the painter adds to the canvas are the days of his life. The adventure of living, hurtling toward death.

We cannot withdraw our cards from the game. Were we as silent and mute as stones, our very passivity would be an act.

To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.