Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes on Freedom
Sartre's Being and Nothingness presents human existence as condemned to freedom: consciousness is nothing in itself and so cannot be determined by anything outside the choices it continually makes about how to take up its situation. The doctrine of bad faith analyzes the characteristic strategies by which people deny this freedom — treating themselves as fixed objects with given natures, or as wholly transcendent of any situation. The lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism (1945) gives the popular formulation: existence precedes essence, and the human being is what it makes of itself.
Quotes
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“Existence precedes essence.”
L'existence précède et commande l'essence. -
“Man is condemned to be free.”
Existentialism Is a Humanism, 1946 -
“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”
p. 41 -
“Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.”
L’important n’est pas ce qu’on fait de nous mais ce que nous faisons nous-même de ce qu’on a fait de nous. -
Attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre:
“We are our choices.”
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“Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom .”
L'imagination ( Imagination: A Psychological Critique ) (1936) -
“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. 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.”
L'âge de raison ( The Age of Reason ) (1945) -
“The painful secret of Gods and kings; it is that men are free. They are free, Aegisthus. You know it and they don't.”
The Flies(1943) | As quoted in Sartre : A Philosophic Study (1966), by Anthony Manser, p. 227 -
“A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.”
The Flies(1943) | King Aegistheus, Act 2 -
“Jupiter : I gave you the liberty to serve me. Orestes : That is possible, but it has turned against you and there is nothing either one of us can do about it.”
The Flies(1943) | Act 3 -
“Remember, Orestes: you were part of my herd, you grazed in the fields along with my sheep. Your liberty is nothing but a mange eating away at you, it is nothing but an exile.”
The Flies(1943) | Jupiter, Act 3 -
“Jupiter : I am not your king, impudent larva? Who then has created you? Orestes : You. But you should not have created me free.”
The Flies(1943) | Act 3