Quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre


Sorted by Popularity


We must act out passion before we can feel it.


If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.


Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.


As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.


Acting is happy agony.


All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.


Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.


Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?


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.


For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.


Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.


If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.


When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.


We do not judge the people we love.


Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.


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.


Existence precedes and rules essence.


The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.


My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.


You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.