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
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
Three o clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Time Management, Time
Man is a useless passion.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Humanity, Humankind
So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the burning marl. Old wives’ tales!There’s no need for red-hot pokers. HELL IS—OTHER PEOPLE!
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Hell
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Life and Living
To eat is to appropriate by destruction.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Food
If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Books, Literature
The poor don’t know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Generosity
We must act out passion before we can feel it.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Passion
Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
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
Everything comes to us from others. To Be is to belong to someone.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Love
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
Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Discovery
Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Action
Life begins on the other side of despair.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Resolve, Happiness, Difficulties, Despair, Perseverance, Adversity, Endurance
Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
God is absence. God is the solitude of man.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Absence
I had been playing with matches and burned a small rug. I was in the process of covering up my crime when suddenly God saw me. I felt His gaze inside my head and on my hands….I flew into a rage against so crude an indiscretion, I blasphemed….He never looked at me again….I had the more difficulty getting rid of Him the Holy Ghost in that He had installed Himself at the back of my head….I collared the Holy Ghost in the cellar and threw Him out.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: God
In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
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
Hell is other people.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Hell
Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Victory
Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them … there is nothing.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Appearance
When the rich wage war it is the poor who die.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: The Poor, Poverty
Violence is good for those who have nothing to lose.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Violence
Friendship doesn’t exist to criticize but to inspire confidence.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Words are loaded pistols.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Words
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
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
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