Quotes by Jean-Paul Sartre

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Art exists only through and for the other... Creation finds its completion only in reading, because the artist must entrust to another the care of fulfilling what he has begun.

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Reading is a pact of generosity between author and reader, each trusts the other, each counts on the other, demands from the other what it demands from itself... The work exists only at the exact level of the real capabilities of the lecturer.

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As the writer has no means of escape, we want him to embrace his age closely: it is his only chance: it is made for him and he is made for it... We do not want to miss anything of our age : perhaps there are others more beautiful, but this is ours: we have only this life to live...

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Any act of writing is a deep commitment.

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To write is to add a pearl to the necklace of the Muses, to leave posterity the memory of an exemplary life, to defend the people against itself and against its enemies.

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Any book is a total recovery of the being.

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There is no instrument that can determine whether a person's decision is right or wrong. Therefore, after every decision a person makes, he will be full of anxiety about whether he made the right decision.

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There are moments when you feel that you can do what you want, go forward or backward in time, and that it doesn't matter; and there are moments when one has the impression that the noose has tightened, and in such cases one must not miss anything, because nothing can be repeated.

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To love one another is to hate a common enemy.

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Everything that exists is born for no reason, lives on from weakness, and dies by chance.

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Man realizes himself only when he undertakes the "heroism of hopeless action".

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My thought is me: therefore I cannot stop. I exist because I think... and I can't stop myself from thinking.

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Man is nothing but what he makes himself.

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Who should love the poor if the poor do not love each other?

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Books were my birds and bird's nests, my pets and stables and meadows; the library was a reflection of the whole world; and the reflection had all the depth, variety, and unexpectedness of the original.

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They let me loose in the library, and I set out on a siege of human wisdom.

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Through my eyes I sucked in poisoned words, far richer than I knew; and some strange power, with the power of words, recreated in me the story of madmen with whom I had nothing to do, the gnawing sadness, the slow destruction of an entire life: what if the words infect me, and the poisoning becomes fatal? I absorbed the word, I was absorbed by the image, and in the end the only thing that saved me was that the two simultaneous dangers mutually neutralized each other.

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God's works and great human creations were shaped by the same inspiration; the same rainbow sparkled on the foam of the waterfall, hid between Flaubert's lines and flashed on the shadows of Rembrandt's light: the Spirit.

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I respected my teacher for two reasons: he wanted good for me and his breath smelled bad. Yes, the big ones should be ugly, wrinkled, unpleasant; if they hugged me, it was almost a good thing that I had to overcome a slight awkwardness: it proved that it is not so easy to be good.

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A spoiled child is not sad; he's just bored like a king. Like a dog.

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Anne-Marie, the girl, spent her childhood in a chair. They taught him to be bored, to sit up straight, to sew. He had a talent for one thing or another, but it was thought more noble to leave it fallow; her radiant beauty was carefully hidden from him.

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I never think of my abandonment; on the one hand, I have no words to describe it, on the other hand, I don't even notice it: since they take care of me unceasingly; loneliness is the fabric of my life, the basis of all my thoughts, the substance of my joys.

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After a moment I understood: the book speaks. Scary sentences poured out of him like so many centipedes, the syllables and letters just buzzed, stretched their double vowels, vibrated the double consonants, the nasal sounds, the sounds, pauses and sighs in between; these sentences were full of unknown words, they were drunk on themselves, on their own tricks, not caring about me; sometimes they disappeared before I could understand them, other times I already knew what they were going to say, but they just continued to ramble on, they wouldn't let go of a single word.

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I treat inferiors as my equals; it's a kind trick to make them happy, and it's fitting that they sit on me, at least to a certain extent.

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Good comes from the depths of my heart, Truth from the fog of my young life.

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I am not satisfied with my good nature; I want to be a prophet: the mouth of a child proclaims the truth. Children are still close to nature, relatives of the wind and the sea, and their swelling words speak great and obscure truths to those who have ears to hear.

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Bad desires and bad thoughts, if they appear at all, come from outside, and as soon as they penetrate into me, they lose their strength and wither away: evil does not find a footing in me.

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I'm not a leader, I don't want to be. To command, to obey - the two go together.

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It's not enough to die: you have to die at the right time.

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There is no good father, that is the rule; the men are not to be blamed for it, but the permanently damaged father-child relationship.

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All writing has a meaning, even if this meaning is far from what the author wanted to give it.

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The more impossible life is, the less bearable death is.

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I needed God, it was given to me, I received it, without knowing it: I was looking for him. And since it did not take root in my heart, it lingered in me for a while and then died.

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- You do not love me any more? - I do not know. (...) I think I still love you. I just don't feel it.

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I didn't regret anything in the world. Of course, there were a lot of things I could have regretted: the taste of mantahilla, the big summer baths in the small bay near Cadiz. But now death has stripped away all beauty.

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The way you know someone loves you is that you feel freer in their company than when you are alone.

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Man must create himself: since our freedom is a given, we must choose step by step, which gives us responsibility.

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Three o'clock is always too late or too early to do anything.

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Freedom is what you do with what has been done to you.

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Prose is like a window and poetry is like a mirror.

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Literature dries up if it is reduced to innocence and songs. It's worth nothing if every single sentence you write doesn't resonate on every human and social level.

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The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free.

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The world is unfair. If you accept this, you will be called an accomplice, and if you change it, you will be called an executioner.

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There is always something left in us that we know but never talk about.

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If asked, even the most deeply hidden things must be said. The relationship between people is complicated by the fact that everyone keeps something back, something that is important only to the person they are talking to. After all, a person should always be transparent.

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Style (...) is nothing more than saying three or four things at the same time in the same sentence. If you can't put more meaning into your sentences, don't even pick up a pen. It is precisely this ambiguity that distinguishes a literary text from a scientific one.

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In life, one commits oneself and thus draws one's own portrait.

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Every choice is also a rejection.

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Given the goal and the means, the imposed task; a man rises above the heaviest, lowest clouds, with his hand he touches a bright and tight shell, that is the ceiling; there are additional ceilings, lighter and thinner shells, and maybe the sky is blue all the way up.

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A well-written book can never hurt.

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Being a staunch materialist, the role of my epic idealism is to compensate to the death for injuries I did not suffer, for shame I did not feel.

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It is not enough that a person has eyes (...), he must learn to see.

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Mere intention does not make anyone a hero; courage and talent are not enough, even monsters and dragons are needed.

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I have always preferred to blame myself rather than the universe; not out of whim, but so that I can only thank myself for what I am.

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I arranged for myself to perceive the passing of my life as an irresistible force of attraction, which, perhaps against my will, constantly forces me to take new steps forward.

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Culture does not save anything or anyone, nor does it justify it, but it is a human creation: man projects himself into it, recognizes himself in it; he sees his own image only in this critical mirror.

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I have never felt like the happy owner of a "talent"; my only goal was to redeem myself - empty-handed, empty-pocketed - through work and faith. As a result, my mere choice did not elevate me above anyone: without equipment, without preparation, I threw everything into work to redeem myself in every way.

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No one is cynical. To suffer without agony is the pastime of the saints. But only up to a certain point: sooner or later, these virgins will be stigmatized by their lasciviousness, and the generous will turn out to be stingy. If, on the other hand, they discover the actual cancer in themselves, their holy nature, then, like all sinners, they seek justification. Tintoretto is no saint; he knows that the whole town condemns his proceedings; if he insists on standing by them, he does so because he vindicates himself against the city.

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No one wants to admit that he was aware of his own genius: genius is a foolish adventure, he knows what he dares, but no longer what he is worth.

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Nothing is more wretched than that melancholy audacity which wants the moon, and then perishes without getting it.

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Concerned beautiful souls, who want to benefit from the living from the dead, primarily for your own edification, look - if you like - for the obvious proof of passion in his disorder. However, passion is as diverse as the person himself: there are consuming and pondering, dreamy and troublesome, practical, abstract, peevish, rushing, and many hundreds more.

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The precisely delineated possibilities, the pre-written, readable destiny, the easy-to-see, transparent future (...), all this kills dreams: we can only want what we are capable of. This moderation makes a man a raging lunatic, it arouses the most insane, short-term ambition.

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If you feel lonely alone, you are in bad company.