Jean-Paul Sartre Mean Quotations

I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.

The [Communist] Party has one objective: the creation of a socialist economy; and one means: the utilization of the class struggle.

As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished.

What do you want to do with the [Communist] Party? A racing stable? What good is it to sharpen a knife every day if you never useit for slicing? A party is never more than a means. There is only one objective: power.

A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.

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

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.

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

Even this disability from which I suffer I have assumed by the very fact that I live; I surpass ittoward my own projects, I make of it the necessary obstacle for my being and I cannot be crippledwithout choosing myself as crippled. This means that I choose the way I constitute my disability (as'unbearable', 'humiliating, 'to be hidden', 'to be revealed to all').

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.

That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst.

What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterward.

It is meaningless that we are born, it is meaningless that we die.

Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.