Quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre

Life gave me everything I asked If all I asked was not a great deal, that's my problem!

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

The more absurd life is, the more insupportable death is.

I had dreamed my life for nearly fifty years (I am about to be fifty-nine). But, you see, there are two tones in Les Mats: the echo of this condemnation and a mitigation of that severity.

As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.

Life is a useless passion.

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

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

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

I had spent my time counterfeiting eternity.

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

Time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.

Words are loaded pistols.

For the time being I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of all flabby masses which move spontaneously.

Take [Stéphane] Mallarme. I hold him to be the greatest of French poets, and I have taken some time to understand him !

The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.

What never vary are the necessities of being in the world, of having to labor and to die there.

It's just what people do when they're getting old, when they're sick of themselves and their life; they think of money and take care of themselves.

Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom-ah the soul-destroying boredom-of long days of mild content.