841 Quotes by Jean-Paul Sartre

I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.

Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.

Life has no meaning the moment you loose the illusion of being eternal.

I am condemned to freedom. I am not free because I can make choices, but because I must make them, all the time, even when I think I have no choice to make.

I am responsible for everything except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being. Therefore everything takes place as if I were compelled to be responsible. I am abandoned in the world... in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. ... Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence.Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

Even this disability from which I suffer I have assumed by the very fact that I live; I surpass ittoward my own projects, I make of it the necessary obstacle for my being and I cannot be crippledwithout choosing myself as crippled. This means that I choose the way I constitute my disability (as'unbearable', 'humiliating, 'to be hidden', 'to be revealed to all').

The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose, not his individuality, but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him.