Jean-Paul Sartre taught philosophy during the 1930s at La Havre and Paris. Captured by the Nazis while serving as an Army meteorologist, Sartre was a prisoner of war for one year before returning to his teaching position, where he participated actively in the French resistance to German occupation until the liberation.
Recognizing a connection between the principles of existentialism and the more practical concerns of social and political struggle, Sartre wrote not only philosophical treatises but also novels, stories, plays, and political pamphlets. Sartre was deeply influenced by Marx, Husserl, Descartes, Kant, and Heidegger. Sartre devotes particular concern to emotion as a spontaneous activity of consciousness projected onto reality.
(1905-1980)
– Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes –
Men equally honest, equally devoted to their fatherland, are momentarily separated by different conceptions of their duty.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
I tell you the truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Perception is naturally surpassed toward action; better yet, it can be revealed only in and through projects of action. The world is revealed as an “always future hollow”, for we are always future to ourselves.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
It’s the well-behaved children … that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don’t say a word, they don’t hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on they make society pay dearly.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Happiness has to be installed in each person as a state of affairs completely cut off from the process that brought it about and, in particular, from the real situation.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
The revolution you dream of is not ours. You don’t want to change the world, you want to blow it up.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
A good hanging now and then, that entertains folk in the provinces and robs death of its glamour.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Words are loaded pistols.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are – that is the fact.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
It is only in our decisions that we are important.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
There is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
There is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
There is no reality except in action
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
I am the architect of my own self, my own character and destiny.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
We are all free, completely free. We can each do any damn thing we want. Which is more than most of us dare to imagine.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
The world can get by nicely without literature. But without human beings it can get by better yet.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Once freedom lights its beacon in man’s heart, the gods are powerless against him.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
I am not asking for sensational revelations, but I would like to sense the meaning of that minute, to feel it’s urgency
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
In love, one and one are one.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
