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Quotes About Isolation

He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else's nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
The Nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the café, I am the one who is within it.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
A man rarely feels like laughing alone.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
J'ai envie de partir, de m'en aller quelque part où je serais vraiment à ma place, où je m'emboîterais... Mais ma place n'est nulle part; je suis de trop.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Then time started flowing again and the emptiness grew larger.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: hell is other people.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
The Nausea has stayed down there, in the yellow light. I am happy: this cold is so pure, this night so pure: am I myself not a wave of icy air? With neither blood, nor lymph, nor flesh. Flowing down this long canal towards the pallor down there. To be nothing but coldness.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
At an age when most children are playing hopscotch or with their dolls,you, poor child, who had no friends or toys, you toyed with dreams of murder, because that is a game to play alone.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Alors c'est ça l'enfer. Je ne l'aurais jamais cru… Vous vous rappelez : le souffre, le bûcher, le gril.. Ah quelle plaisanterie. Pas besoin de gril, l'enfer c'est les autres.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
I must be without remorse or regrets as I am without excuse; for from the instant of my upsurge into being, I carry the weight of the world by myself alone without anything or any person being able to lighten it.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
I have been much too calm these past three years. I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
I have no taste for work any longer, I can do nothing more except wait for night. 530: Things are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
I shall never sleep again. But then—how shall I endure my own company?
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Outside nature, against nature, without excuse, beyond remedy, except what remedy I find within myself.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Lucien thought with bitter pleasure that his parents found him looking fine. "I don't exist." He closed his eyes and let himself drift: existence is an illusion because I know I don t exist, all I have to do is plug my ears and not think about anything and I'll become nothingness.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Tuesday: Nothing. Existed.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
These young people amaze me; drinking their coffee, they tell clear, plausible stories. If you ask them what they did yesterday, they don't get flustered; they tell you all about it in a few words. If I were in their place, I'd start stammering. It's true that for a long time now nobody has bothered how I spend my time. When you live alone, you even forget what it is to tell a story : plausibility disappears at the same time as friends.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
You don't put your past in your pocket; you have to have a house. I have only my body: a man entirely alone, with his lonely body, cannot indulge in memories; they pass through him. I shouldn't complain: all I wanted was to be free.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
God is absence. God is the solitude of man.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face. Or perhaps it is because I am a single man? People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face ... People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked? You might say -- yes you might say, nature without humanity.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
It was true, I had always realized it—I hadn't any "right" to exist at all. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant, a microbe. I could feel nothing to myself but an inconsequential buzzing. I was thinking…that here we are eating and drinking, to preserve our precious existence, and that there's nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre