Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes on God
Jean-Paul Sartre was a 20th-century French philosopher, playwright, novelist, and political activist, the leading public exponent of existentialism in the post-war period. This page collects quotes attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre on the topic of god, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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“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 -
“For those who want 'to change life", 'to reinvent love,' God is nothing but a hindrance.”
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr(1952) | p. 500 -
“What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.”
The Flies(1943) | Orestes, Act 2 -
“He chooses the most feared, most hated man in order to worship him as a god, feeling sure that he is alone in perceiving the god's secret virtues.”
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr(1952) | p. 165 -
“The consciousness of being betrayed is to the collective consciousness of a sacred group what a certain form of schizophrenia is to the individual...it is a form of madness.”
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr(1952) | p. 193 -
“They are in bad faith — they are afraid — and fear , bad faith have an aroma that the gods find delicious. Yes, the gods like that, the pitiful souls.”
The Flies(1943) | Act 1 -
“And when we speak of "abandonment" - a favorite word of Heidegger - we only mean to say that God does not exist and that it is necessary to draw the consequences of his absence to the end.”
Existentialism Is a Humanism(1946) | pp. 32–33