Best Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes
Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes About No Exit, Freedom, Death, Existentialism, God, Religion, Life & Love! In addition to being a philosopher, dramatist, political activist, and writer, Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was all of the above and more. He was a crucial figure in phenomenology and existentialism throughout his lifetime. Paris, France, was the place where he was born on June 21, 1905, Henri Bergson’s article “Time and Free Will” piqued Sartre’s interest in philosophy when he was a young man.
He got his Ph.D. in philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he studied philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Heidegger. During World War II, Sartre worked as a meteorologist in the French military. In 1940, he was taken by the Germans and held as a prisoner of war for nine months.
After returning to Paris, Sartre helped create the clandestine organization Socialisme et Liberté with a handful of other authors. In a short time, he released Being and Nothingness, The Flies, and No Exit, the existentialist novels that made him famous. Throughout his life, Sartre took inspiration from his experiences in the trenches. Sartre valued his position as a public thinker highly.
As a result of his involvement in political activism after World War II. He was an ardent critic of French colonialism in Algeria. In the memoir of his first ten years of existence, Sartre declared his literary apostasy in 1964. Literature, he said, was ultimately a bourgeois substitute for genuine involvement in the world. As a result of his work, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964. He was the first Nobel Laureate to turn down the award. On April 15, 1980, he passed away in Paris from pulmonary edema.
Best Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes
1. “Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
2. “Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
3. “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give life a meaning.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
4. “He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
5. “Hell is other people.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
6. “I am. I am, I exist. I think, therefore I am.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
7. “I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
8. “To be or not be, right?” -Jean-Paul Sartre
9. “I exist because I think, and I can’t prevent myself from thinking.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
10. “In a world, man must create his own essence. It is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
11. “If you are lonely when you are alone, you are in bad company.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
12. “We are our choices.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
13. “In order to make himself thoroughly undesirable, he will speak.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
14. “Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
15. “Life begins on the other side of despair.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
16. “He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
17. “Man is nothing but what he makes of himself.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
18. “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
19. “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.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
20. “Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
21. “To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
22. “We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
23. “Every existing thing is born without a reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
24. “Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
25. “I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
26. “For those who want ‘to change life’ or ‘to reinvent love’ God is nothing but a hindrance.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
27. “I do not understand! I understand nothing! I cannot understand nor do I want to understand! I want to believe!” -Jean-Paul Sartre
28. “God is absence. God is the solitude of man.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
29. “I confused things with their names: that is belief.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
30. “I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, eat, sleep. Exist slowly, softly, like trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
