63 Quotes About Sartre

Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.

Amuse yourself, torment your desires. Drink when you're thirsty -- that would be very much too simple! If you didn't harbour a temptation eternally in your soul, you'd run the risk of forgetting yourself.

Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face. Or perhaps it is because I am a single man? People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?

Sartre expresses the basic tenet of existentialism in this way: Existence precedes essence. In this statement he is taking existentia and essentia according to their metaphysical meaning, which from Plato's time on has said that essentia precedes existentia. Sartre reverses this statement. But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it he stays with metaphysics in oblivion of the truth of Being.

Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man....

My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.

It is the reflection of my face. Often in these lost days I study it: I can understand nothing of this face. The faces of others have some sense, some direction. Not mine. I cannot even decide whether it is handsome or ugly. I think it is ugly because I have been told so. But it doesn't strike me. At heart, I am even shocked that anyone can attribute qualities of this kind to it, as if you called a clod of earth or a block of stone beautiful or ugly.

In the state I was in, if someone had come and told me I could go home quietly,that they would leave me my life whole, it would have left me cold: several hours orseveral years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.

[W]hat we also see in sex is a kind of submissiveness. But not a kind of submissiveness which is simply 'do what you like, I'm just here for you', but it...is, or can be, very manipulative. It is a way of getting the other person to exercise all his or her efforts towards pleasing you, and in that way controlling what they're thinking, and in particular what they're thinking of you.