Jean-Paul Sartre

There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.

You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.

I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.

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.

What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.

A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

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.

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

God is absence. God is the solitude of man.

I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.

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

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

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

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

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.

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

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.

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?

Existence precedes and rules essence.

Acting is happy agony.

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

The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

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

Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.

If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

Hell is other people.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

Words are loaded pistols.

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

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

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.