Jean-Paul Sartre Exist Quotations

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

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.

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.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

Time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.

Nothingness haunts Being.

Existence is an imperfection.

Existence is prior to essence.

Il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action. (There is no reality except in action.)

There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.

The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.

This is the basis for the joy of love when there is joy; we feel that our existence is justified.

Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes essence.

Therefore, in the nature of this will for freedom, which freedom itself implies, I may pass judgement on those who seek to hide from themselves the complete arbitrariness and the complete freedom of their existence.

Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.

Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.

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.

Words are loaded pistols.

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.

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. ... Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence.Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

Death is a continuation of my life without me...

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

I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.