Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes (125 Quotes)


    The rain has stopped, the air is mild, the sky slowly rolls up fine black images : it is more than enough to frame the perfect moment ; to reflect these images, she would cause dark little tides to be born in our hearts. I don't know how to take advantage of the occasion : I walk at random, calm and empty, under this wasted sky.

    The sun is not ridiculous, quite the contrary. On everything I like, on the rust of the construction girders, on the rotten boards of the fence, a miserly, uncertain light falls, like the look you give, after a sleepless night, on decisions made with enthusiasm the day before, on pages you have written in one spurt without crossing out a word.


    The vegetation has crawled mile for mile towards the towns. It is waiting. When the town dies, the Vegetation will invade it, it will clamber over the stones, it will grip them, search them, burst them open with its long black pincers; it will bind the holes and hang its green paws everywhere.

    Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up; I forget them almost immediately.


    When she was in Djibouti and I was in Aden, and I used to go and see her for twenty-four hours, she managed to multiply the misunderstandings between us until there were exactly sixty minutes before I had to leave; sixty minutes, just long enough to make you feel the seconds passing one by one.


    I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.

    A little more and I would have fallen into the mirror trap. I avoided it, but only to fall into the window trap: with nothing to do, my arms dangling, I go over to the window.

    It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy ,generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.

    A madman's ravings are absurd in relation to the situation in which he finds himself, but not in relation to his madness.


    And I too wanted to be. That is all I wanted; and this is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts which seemed without bounds, I find the same desire again: to drive existence out of me, to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note. That could even make an apologue: there was a poor man who got in the wrong world.

    Most of the time, because of their failure to fasten on to words, my thoughts remain misty and nebulous. They assume vague, amusing shapes and are then swallowed up: I promptly forget them.

    But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a vertiable revolution takes place.


    Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of form a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all.

    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.

    He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.

    Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.

    I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together.

    People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?

    I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved. These are honest hypotheses which take the facts into account: but I sense so definitely that they come from me, and that they are simply a way of unifying my own knowledge. Not a glimmer comes from Rollebon's side. Slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves to the rigour of the order I wish to give them; but it remains outside of them. I have the feeling of doing a work of pure imagination.

    She suffers as a miser. She must be miserly with her pleasures, as well. I wonder if sometimes she doesn't wish she were free of this monotonous sorrow, of these mutterings which start as soon as she stops singing, if she doesn't wish to suffer once and for all, to drown herself in despair. In any case, it would be impossible for her: she is bound.

    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.

    I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think any more, I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I . . . because . . . ugh!

    I exist. It's sweet, so sweet, so slow. And light: you'd think it floated all by itself. It stirs. It brushes by me, melts and vanishes. Gently, gently. There is bubbling water in my throat, it caresses me- and now it comes up again into my mouth. For ever I shall have a little pool of whitish water in my mouth - lying low - grazing my tongue. And this pool is still me. And the tongue. And the throat is me.

    I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.

    I grow warm, I begin to feel happy. There is nothing extraordinary in this, it is a small happiness of Nausea: it spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of out time - the time of purple suspenders, and broken chair seats; it is made of white, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain. No sooner than born, it is already old, it seems as though I have known it for twenty years.


    I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then anything, anything could happen.

    I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.




    Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.


    My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

    Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.


    For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.


    Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

    I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.


    I was escaping from Nature and at last becoming myself, that Other whom I was aspiring to be in the eyes of others.

    Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

    We are possessed by the things we possess. When I like an object, I always give it to someone. It isn't generosity it's only because I want others to be enslaved by objects, not me.


    I am condemned to freedom. I am not free because I can make choices, but because I must make them, all the time, even when I think I have no choice to make.


    More Jean-Paul Sartre Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Man - Life - God - People - World - Happiness - Mind - Time - Thought & Thinking - Literature - Charity - Facts - Sadness - Death & Dying - Place - War & Peace - Truth - Change - Belief & Faith - View All Jean-Paul Sartre Quotations

    More Jean-Paul Sartre Quotations (By Book Titles)


    - Nausea

    Related Authors


    John Stuart Mill - Heraclitus - Deepak Chopra - David Hume - Arthur Schopenhauer - Theodor Adorno - Ludwig Wittgenstein - Democritus - Baruch Spinoza - Anaxagoras


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