Jean-Paul Sartre

All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure.

If you begin by saying, 'Thou shalt not lie,' there is no longer any possibility of political action.

But for me there is neither Monday nor Sunday: there are days which pass in disorder, and then, sudden lightning like this one. Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I can't describe it, it's like the Nausea and yet it's just the opposite: at last an adventure happens to me and when I question myself I see that it happens that I am myself and that I am here; I am the one who splits in the night, I am as happy as the hero of a novel.

I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.

Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.

A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

He loves me, he doesn't love my bowels, if they showed him my appendix in a glass he wouldn't recognize it, he's always feeling me, but if they put the glass in his hands he wouldn't touch it, he wouldn't think, "that's hers," you ought to love all of somebody, the esophagus, the liver, the intestines. Maybe we don't love them because we aren't used to them, but if we saw them the way we saw our hands and arms maybe we'd love them; the starfish must love each other better than we do.

Introspection is always retrospection

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

I wanted my own words. But the ones I use have dragged through I don't know how many consciences.

If you seek authenticity for authenticity's sake you are no longer authentic.

The consciousness that says 'I am' is not the consciousness that thinks.

Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.

You are -- your life, and nothing else.

Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.