841 Quotes by Jean-Paul Sartre

Don’t you ever get taken that way? When I can’t see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself just to make sure, but it doesn’t help much.

I must wash myself clean with abstract thoughts, transparent as water.

Unity may be achieved under a strong man, but the time comes when a people must stop looking for a savior and take responsibility for their own future.

This is the girl, here, this girl with a ruined look who touches me and whom I love.

The only being which can be called free is the being which nihilates its being.

Everything is silent again: but it isn’t the same silence. It’s raining: tapping lightly against the frosted glass windows; if there are any more masked children in the street, the rain is going to spoil their cardboard masks.

But no: he was empty, he was confronted by a vast anger, a desperate anger, he saw it and could almost have touched it. But it was inert – if it were to live and find expression and suffer, he must lend it his own body. It was other people’s anger. “Swine!” He clenched his fists, he strode along, but nothing came, the anger remained external to himself.

The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust.

I am on the same plane specific object and free subject but never the two at the same time and always the one haunted by the Other.