Sartre Quotes

“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions

“Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions

“There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions

“...Although the term Existentialism was invented in the 20th century by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel, the roots of this thought go back much further in time, so much so, that this subject was mentioned even in the Old Testament. If we take, for example, the Book of Ecclesiastes, especially chapter 5, verses 15-16, we will find a strong existential sentiment there which declares, 'This too is a grievous evil: As everyone comes, so they depart, and what do they gain, since they toil for the wind?' The aforementioned book was so controversial that in the distant past there were whole disputes over whether it should be included in the Bible. But if nothing else, this book proves that Existential Thought has always had its place in the centre of human life. However, if we consider recent Existentialism, we can see it was the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre who launched this movement, particularly with his book Being and Nothingness, in 1943. Nevertheless, Sartre's thought was not a new one in philosophy. In fact, it goes back three hundred years and was first uttered by the French philosopher René Descartes in his 1637 Discours de la Méthode, where he asserts, 'I think, therefore I am' . It was on this Cartesian model of the isolated ego-self that Sartre built his existential consciousness, because for him, Man was brought into this world for no apparent reason and so it cannot be expected that he understand such a piece of absurdity rationally.''

'' Sir, what can you tell us about what Sartre thought regarding the unconscious mind in this respect, please?'' a charming female student sitting in the front row asked, listening keenly to every word he had to say.

''Yes, good question. Going back to Sartre's Being and Nothingness it can be seen that this philosopher shares many ideological concepts with the Neo-Freudian psychoanalysts but at the same time, Sartre was diametrically opposed to one of the fundamental foundations of psychology, which is the human unconscious. This is precisely because if Sartre were to accept the unconscious, the same subject would end up dissolving his entire thesis which revolved around what he understood as being the liberty of Man. This stems from the fact that according to Sartre, if a person accepts the unconscious mind he is also admitting that he can never be free in his choices since these choices are already pre-established inside of him. Therefore, what can clearly be seen in this argument is the fact that apparently, Sartre had no idea about how physics, especially Quantum Mechanics works, even though it was widely known in his time as seen in such works as Heisenberg's The Uncertainty Principle, where science confirmed that first of all, everything is interconnected - the direct opposite of Sartrean existential isolation - and second, that at the subatomic level, everything is undetermined and so there is nothing that is pre-established; all scientific facts that in themselves disprove the Existential Ontology of Sartre and Existentialism itself...”
― Anton Sammut, Paceville and Metanoia

“It isn't freedom from. It's freedom to.”
― Jean Paul Sartre

“Başlangıç olmadığı gibi, son da yoktur. Bir kadın, bir dost, bir kent bir kerede terk edilemez. Hepsi birbirine benzer zaten.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Whenever the wife wants to do drugs, she thinks about Sartre. One bad trip and then a giant lobster followed him around for the rest of his days.”
― Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation

“Faire souffrir c'est posséder et créer tout autant que détruire.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire

“- Tu es et tu resteras toujours une petite-bourgeoise moraliste. Comme Camus.
- Tu es et tu resteras toujours un petit con prétencieux. Comme Sartre.”
― Jean-Michel Guenassia, Le Club des incorrigibles optimistes

“When you live alone, you even forget what it is to tell a story: plausibility disappears at the same time as friends. You let events flow by too: you suddenly see people appear who speak and then go away; you plunge into stories of which you can't make head or tail: you'd make a terrible witness. But on the other hand, everything improbable, everything which nobody would ever believe in a cafe, comes your way.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“So I was a poodle of the future; I made prophecies.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“You have to talk to make sure you're alive.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“My whole life is behind me. I see it completely, I see its shape and the slow movements which have brought me this far. There is little to say about it: a lost game, that’s all.

I had lost the first round. I wanted to play the second and I lost again: I lost the whole game. At the same time, I learned that you always lose. Only the rascals think they win.

Now I am going to be like Anny, 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.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Things are entirely what they appear to be and BEHIND THEM... there is nothing.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“why distort a past that can no longer stand up for itself?”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“The words I speak are too big for my mouth, they tear it; the load of destiny I bear is too heavy for my youth and has shattered it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“here we are, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence, and that there's nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“The existentialist cannot accept that man can be helped by any sign on earth, for he will interpret the sign as he chooses.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

“people talk a lot about this famous passing of time, but you scarcely see it. You see a woman, you think that one day she will be old, only you don't SEE her grow old. But there are moments when you think you SEE her growing old and you feel yourself growing old with her: that is the feeling of adventure.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“FIRST FURY: You see! You see! . . . That's quite true, little doll; you're less afraid of us than of
that man. Because you need us, Electra. You are our child, our little girl. You need our nails to score your skin, our teeth to bite your breast, and all our savage love to save you from your hatred of yourself. Only the suffering of your body can take your mind off your suffering soul. So come and let us hurt you. You have only those two steps to come down, and we will take you in our arms. And when our kisses sear your tender flesh, you'll forget all in the cleansing fires of pain.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“HUGO [smiling]: Go to hell.
OLGA: You shouldn't have said that.
HUGO: Why not?
OLGA: One doesn't say things like that.
HUGO [astonished]: Olga, are you superstitious?
OLGA [upset]: Certainly not. [HUGO watches her attentively.]
HUGO: What is he going to do?
OLGA: It's no business of yours.
HUGO: He's going to bomb the Korsk bridge?
OLGA: Why do you want me to tell you? If something goes wrong, the less you know, the better off you are.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“In fact this was outrageous to many of his early admirers, that he would become a revolutionary Marxist, because in the United States that always had been associated with Soviet style bureaucratic Marxism and of course then you began to think about the Cold War and all the little films you saw in grade school of Russian kids with their hands hanging on barbed wire, and all that stuff... which actually wasn’t a mode of thought, but was just our mode of propaganda. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t better than their propaganda; events have proven it was… better.”
― Rick Roderick

“Life decisions—making too many and/or making them too easily is as dangerous as not making them at all. How clearly mania and depression outline the extremes of the dilemma of us all before the terrible fact of choice: indecisiveness in depression—nothing can be done; overdecisiveness in mania—everything is to be done and nothing gets done. We are doomed to choose, Sartre said, yet we don’t know when to choose and when not to choose.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, The Concepts of Psychiatry: A Pluralistic Approach to the Mind and Mental Illness

“Sartre's perspective of freedom is neither redemptive nor creative, but
of a cold mechanical and mathematical causality - you are "doomed" to be free. Basically, he didn't mean that we are free, but that we need to believe that we are.”
― Jeff Ampolini

“Hayatımızın anlamını biz yaratmayız, onu keşfederiz, der Sartre.”
― Héctor García, Ikigai: Los secretos de Japón para una vida larga y joven

“O humanismo sartreano não tem nada a ver com nenhum dogmatismo. Cabe a cada um apropriar-se dele e construi-lo através de uma existência zelosa de sua singularidade na afirmação constante da liberdade, para si mesmo e para os outros.”
― Frederic Allouche, Ser livre com Sartre

“…Sartre, expanding on Descartes, wrote that the reason we know others exist is because when they look at us, we feel looked at. He called the entity that was staring back at us the Other. From that meeting of the eyes, everything else in our fragile human universes blossomed forth. But! Think of how easily human status is taken away—by war, by hospitals, by arguments about whose turn it is to take out the recycling. How easily we can turn people into things. And now Tanya had turned me into a thing.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“Existentialism is the interpreted content of the Flaubertian text and of his life: the sum of “Flaubert” or Flaubert signified.”
― AMCX, Sartre, Flaubert, Lynch: Return to Yonville

“Sartre is no ordinary reader, so if for most of Flaubert's readers there is no immediate takeoff, with Sartre it was instantaneous: Sartre/Flaubert=Lynch.”
― AMCX, Sartre, Flaubert, Lynch: Return to Yonville