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
If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Defeat
Words are loaded pistols.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Words
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
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
Life begins on the other side of despair.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Difficulties, Happiness, Perseverance, Resolve, Despair, Endurance, Adversity
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
In love, one and one are one.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Freedom
It is only in our decisions that we are important.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Decisions
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Life and Living, Live
Violence is good for those who have nothing to lose.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Violence
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
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
The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Topics: Age, Wisdom, Adversity, Aging, Time Management
Friendship doesn’t exist to criticize but to inspire confidence.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
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