Jean-Paul Sartre Ideas Quotations

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.

Why do you keep maintaining your ideas are right if you can't prove them?

Photographs are not ideas. They give us ideas.

There are photographers who push for war because they make stories. They search for a Chinese who has a more Chinese are than the others and they end up finding one. They have him take a typically Chinese pose and surround him with chinoiseries. What have they captured on their film? A Chinese? Definitely not: the idea of the Chinese.

One does not adopt a new idea, one slips into it.

Ideas come in pairs and they contradict one another; their opposition is the principal engine of reflection.

I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.

The individual's duty is to do what he wants to do, to think whatever he likes, to be accountable to no one but himself, to challenge every idea and every person.

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.