Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Jean-Paul Sartre (French Philosopher)

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (1905–80) was a French philosopher, novelist, playwright, and critic. The principal exponent of existentialism, his work dealt with the nature of human life and the structures of consciousness. He ranks as the most versatile writer and as a towering influence on three decades of French intellectual life.

Born in Paris, Sartre was a first cousin to Albert Schweitzer. Sartre entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1924, where he met the novelist Simone de Beauvoir. She became his lifetime romantic and intellectual companion.

After finishing mandatory military service, Sartre took a teaching job in Le Havre and wrote his first novel, La Nausée (1938; Nausea.) Judged by some the century’s most influential French novel, La Nausée depicts man adrift in a godless universe, hostage to his angst-ridden freedom.

Sartre was one of the French intellectuals who openly resisted the Nazi occupation of France. He spent a year as a prisoner of war during World War II. After this, he wrote his first major work in philosophy, L’êtreet le Néant (1943; Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology.)

Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism (i.e., each person is responsible for his actions and their consequences) is rooted in his dramatic works. He turned to playwriting and produced a series of theatrical successes which are necessarily dramatizations of his philosophical ideas: Les mains sales (1948; Dirty Hands,) Le diable et le bon dieu (1957; The Devil and the Good Lord,) and Les Séquestrés d’Altona (1959; The Condemned of Altona.)

Sartre also wrote the comedies La putain respectueuse (1946; The Respectful Prostitute,) Kean (1954,) and Nekrassov (1955) and the three-volume novel, Les Chemins de la Liberté (1945–49; The Roads to Freedom.) In 1960, Sartre returned to philosophy, publishing the first volume of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason,) an amendment of his existentialism through Marxist ideas.

Sartre also wrote major studies of literary figures and many essays. He was awarded and rejected the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature. When he died in 1980, some 50,000 people turned out on the streets of Paris to pay their respects.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Jean-Paul Sartre

The poor don’t know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Generosity

Everything comes to us from others. To Be is to belong to someone.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Love

In love, one and one are one.
—Jean-Paul Sartre

If you are lonely when you are alone, you are in bad company.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Miscellaneous, Loneliness, One liners

Life begins on the other side of despair.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Endurance, Resolve, Perseverance, Difficulties, Happiness, Adversity, Despair

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.
—Jean-Paul Sartre

If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Books, Literature

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Food

Never have I thought that I was the happy possessor of a “talent” my sole concern has been to save myself by work and faith.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Talent

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.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Existence

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Life and Living

God is absence. God is the solitude of man.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Absence

Friendship doesn’t exist to criticize but to inspire confidence.
—Jean-Paul Sartre

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Thinking

Words are loaded pistols.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Words

I am responsible for everything except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being. Therefore everything takes place as if I were compelled to be responsible. I am abandoned in the world… in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Responsibility

We do not do what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are – that is the fact.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Carpe-diem

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Live, Life and Living, How to Live

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Defeat

Violence is good for those who have nothing to lose.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Violence

We cannot withdraw our cards from the game. Were we as silent and mute as stones, our very passivity would be an act.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Life

Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Action

When the rich wage war it is the poor who die.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Poverty, The Poor

I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Creation

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Freedom

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.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Generosity

I hate victims who respect their executioners.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Respectability, Respect

Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them … there is nothing.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Appearance

It is only in our decisions that we are important.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Decisions

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Possibilities

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