Quotes About Action

I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.

know very well that I don't want to do anything: to do something is to create existence—and there's quite enough existence as it is.

Freedom is what we do with what is done to us

Commitment is an act, not a word

Existentialism is no mournful delectation but a humanist philosophy of action, effort, combat, and solidarity. Man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines say what this man is before he dies, or what mankind is before it has disappeared.

Oppressed with countless little daily cares, he had waited... For an act. A free, considered act; that should pledge his whole life, and stand at the beginning of a new existence.

From the very fact, indeed, that I am conscious of the motives which solicit my action, these motives are already transcendent objects from my consciousness, they are outside; in vain shall I seek to cling to them: I escape from them through my very existence. I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the affective and rational motives of my act: I am condemned to be free.

Il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action… [L'être humain] n'existe que dans la mesure où il se réalise, il n'est donc rien d'autre que sa vie

to do something is to create existence

I know very well that I don't want to do anything: to do something is to create existence—and there's quite enough existence as it is.

Je pense, lui dis-je, que nous voilà, tous tant que nous sommes, à manger et à boire pour conserver notre précieuse existence et qu'il n'y a rien, rien, aucune raison d'exister… L'autodidacte répondit que la vie a un sens si on veut bien lui en donner un. Il faut d'abord agir, se jeter dans une entreprise. Il y a un but, Monsieur, il y a un but… il y a les hommes.

Que me den algo que hacer, lo que sea! Sería preferible que pensara en otra cosa, porque en este momento estoy por representarme la comedia. Sé muy bien que no quiero hacer nada; hacer algo es crear existencia, y ya hay bastante existencia.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Peut-on juger une vie sur un seul acte ?

And every man ought to say to himself, "Am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?" And if he does not say that to himself, he is masking his anguish. There is no question here of the kind of anguish which would lead to quietism, to inaction. It is a matter of a simple sort of anguish that anybody who has had responsibilities is familiar with.

Faire, et en faisant se faire et n'être rien que ce qu'on fait

You complain because things don't arrange themselves around you like a bouquet of flowers, without your taking the slightest trouble to do anything. But I have never asked as much: I wanted action. You know, when we played adventurer and adventuress: you were the one who had adventures, I was the one who made them happen.

Seuls les actes décident de ce qu'on a voulu.

First, it has been charged with inviting people to remain in a kind of desperate quietism because, since no solutions are possible, we should have to consider action in this world as quite impossible. We should then end up in a philosophy of contemplation; and since contemplation is a luxury, we come in the end to a bourgeois philosophy. The communists in particular have made these charges.

Hands don't catch thoughts

Gesti, gesti, piccole distruzioni, che cosa significano, io ho creduto che questa fosse la libertà.

The existentialist portrays a coward as one who makes himself a coward by his actions, a hero who makes himself heroic.

a man is more of a man because of what he does not say than what he does say.

Wiem bardzo dobrze, ?e nie chc? nic robi?: czyni? cokolwiek to stwarza? istnienie – a jest i tak wiele istnienia.