841 Quotes by Jean-Paul Sartre

There are also amateurs. These are secretaries, office workers, shopkeepers, people who listen to others in cafes: around forty they feel swollen, with an experience they can't get rid of. Luckily they've made children on whom they can pass it off. They would like to make us believe that theirpast is not lost, that their memories are condensed, gently transformed into Wisdom.

Le génie n'est qu'un prêt: il faut le mériter par de grandes souffrances, par des épreuves modestement, fermement traversées; on finit par entendre des voix et l'on écrit sous la dictée.

All men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?

I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'.

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.

Death is a continuation of my life without me...

Certain details, somewhat curtailed, live in my memory. But I don't see anything any more: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction. There are many cases where even these scraps have disappeared: nothing is left but words.

Still, somewhere in the depths of ourselves we all harbor an ashamed, unsatisfied melancholy that quietly awaits a funeral.