Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes on Life
Sartre's Being and Nothingness analyzes human life as the existence of being-for-itself — consciousness whose being lies in continually transcending what it is toward what it has not yet become. Unlike the things of nature, which are what they are, the for-itself is what it is not and is not what it is: it cannot coincide with any fixed essence and so must constantly take responsibility for the meaning it gives its own situation. Nausea, the Roads to Freedom novels, and the late Critique of Dialectical Reason extend the analysis from the individual to the social and historical conditions under which a life acquires meaning.
Quotes
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“Hell is other people.”
Alors, c'est ça l'enfer. Je n'aurais jamais cru... vous vous rappelez: le soufre, le bûcher, le gril... ah! Quelle plaisanterie. Pas besoin de gril, l'enfer, c'est les autres. -
“Existence precedes essence.”
L'existence précède et commande l'essence. -
“Man is condemned to be free.”
Existentialism Is a Humanism, 1946 -
“Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”
Nausea, 1938 -
“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”
p. 41 -
Attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre:
“Life begins on the other side of despair.”
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“He yawned. He had finished the day and he had also finished with his youth. Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism , smiling tolerance , resignation , common sense stoicism - all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life.”
L'âge de raison ( The Age of Reason ) (1945) -
“I do not give a damn about the dead. They died for the [Communist] Party and the Party can decide what it wants. I practice a live man's politics, for the living.”
Dirty Hands(1948) | Act 5, sc. 3 -
“For those who want 'to change life", 'to reinvent love,' God is nothing but a hindrance.”
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr(1952) | p. 500 -
“But, if it will help ease your irritated souls, please know, dearly departed, that you have ruined our lives.”
The Flies(1943) | Aegistheus, Act 2 -
“One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.”
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr(1952) | Book 2, "The Melodious Child Dead in Me" -
“But since he has decided to have the impossibility of living, every misfortune is an opportunity which lays this importance of living before his eyes and obliges him to decide, once again, to die.”
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr(1952) | p. 158 -
“I wanted for the moments in my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. It would be just as well to try to catch time by the tail.”
Nausea(1938) -
“I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.”
No Exit(1944)