Jean-Paul Sartre - Quotes

Modern thought has realized considerable progress by reducing the existent to the series of appearances which manifest it. Its aim was to overcome a certain number of dualisms which have embarrassed philosophy and to replace them by the monism of the phenomenon.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Being and Nothingness. 1961.

The obvious conclusion is that the dualism of being and appearance is no longer entitled to any legal status within philosophy. The appearance refers to the total series of appearances and not to a hidden reality which would drain to itself alI the being of the existent. And the appearance for Its part is not an inconsistent manifestation of this being.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Being and Nothingness. 1961.

We can equally well reject the dualism of appearance and essence. The appearance does not hide the essence, it reveals it; it is the essence. The essence of an existent is no longer a property sunk in the cavity of this existent; it is the manifest law which presides over the succession of its appearances, it is the principle of the series.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Being and Nothingness. 1961.

Thus the appearance, which is finite, indicates itself in its finitude, but at the same time in order to be grasped as an appearance-of-that-which-appears, it requires that it be surpassed toward infinity.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Being and Nothingness. 1961.

The appearance is not supported by any existent different from itself; it has its own being. The first being which we meet in our ontological inquiry is the being of the appearance.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Being and Nothingness. 1961.

The object does not possess being, and its existence is not a participation in being, nor any other kind of relation. It is. That is the only way to define its manner of being; the object does not hide being, but neither does it reveal being.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Being and Nothingness. 1961.

The being of the phenomenon although coextensive with the phenomenon, can not be subject to the phenomenal condition-which is to exist only in so far as it reveals itself-and that consequently it surpasses the knowledge which we have of it and provides the basis for such knowledge.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Being and Nothingness. 1961.

Not all consciousness is knowledge (there are states of affective consciousness, for example), but all knowing consciousness can be knowledge only of its object.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Being and Nothingness. 1961.

This means also that the type of being of consciousness is the opposite of that which the ontological proof reveals to us. Since consciousness is not possible before being, but since its being is the source and condition of all possibility, its existence implies its essence.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Being and Nothingness. 1961.

Consciousness is prior to nothingness and "is derived" from being.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Being and Nothingness. 1961.

If the act of creation is to be continued indefinitely, if the created being is to be supported even in its inmost parts, if it does not have its own independence, if it is in itself only nothingness-then the creature is in no way distinguished from its creator; it is absorbed in him; we are dealing with a false transcendence, and the creator cannot have even an illusion of getting out of his subjectivity.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Being and Nothingness. 1961.

Consciousness is consciousness of something. This means that transcendence is the constitutive structure of consciousness; that is, that consciousness is born supported by a being which is not itself. This is what we call the ontological proof.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Being and Nothingness. 1961.

The meaning of the being of the existent in so far as it reveals itself to consciousness is the phenomenon of being. This meaning has itself a being, based on which it manifests itself
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Being and Nothingness. 1961.

If being exists as over against God, it is its own support; it does not preserve the least trace of divine creation. In a word, even if it had been created, being-in-itself would be inexplicable in terms of creation; for it assumes its being beyond the creation.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Being and Nothingness. 1961.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is. These are the three characteristics which the preliminary examination of the phenomenon of being allows us to assign to the being of phenomena.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Being and Nothingness. 1961.

Philosophy appears to some people as a homogeneous milieu: there thoughts are born and die, there systems are built, and there, in turn, they collapse. Others take Philosophy for a specific attitude which we can freely adopt at will. Still others see it as a determined segment of culture. In our view Philosophy does not exist. In whatever form we consider it, this shadow of science, this Gray Eminence of humanity, is only a hypostatised abstraction. Actually, there are philosophies. Or rather-for you would never at the same time find more than one living philosophy-under certain well-defined circumstances a philosophy is developed for the purpose of giving expression to the general movement of the society. So long as a philosophy is alive, it serves as a cultural milieu for its contemporaries. This disconcerting object presents itself at the same time under profoundly distinct aspects, the unification of which it is continually effecting.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Critique of Dialectical Reason. 1960.

Those intellectuals who come after the great flowering and who undertake to set the systems in order to use the new methods to conquer territory not yet fully explored, those who provide practical applications for the theory and employ it as a tool to destroy and to construct – they should not be called philosophers. They cultivate the domain, they take an inventory, they erect certain structures there, they may even bring about certain internal changes; but they still get their nourishment from the living thought of the great dead.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Critique of Dialectical Reason. 1960.

Now, in the present phase of our history, productive forces have entered into conflict with relations of production. Creative work is alienated; man does not recognise himself in his own product, and his exhausting labor appears to him as a hostile force. Since alienation comes about as the result of this conflict, it is a historical reality and completely irreducible to an idea. If men are to free themselves from it, and if their work is to become the pure objectification of themselves, it is not enough that “consciousness think itself”; there must be material work and revolutionary praxis.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Critique of Dialectical Reason. 1960.

I found everything perfectly clear, and I really understood absolutely nothing. To understand is to change, to go beyond oneself. This reading did not change me. By contrast, what did begin to change me was the reality of Marxism, the heavy presence on my horizon of the masses of workers, an enormous, sombre body which lived Marxism, which practiced it, and which at a distance exercised an irresistible attraction on petit bourgeois intellectuals.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Critique of Dialectical Reason. 1960.

As soon as there will exist for everyone a margin of real freedom beyond the production of life, Marxism will have lived out its span; a philosophy of freedom will take its place. But we have no means, no intellectual instrument, no concrete experience which allow us to conceive of this freedom or of this philosophy.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Critique of Dialectical Reason. 1960.

Today psychoanalysis alone enables us to study the process by which a child, groping in the dark, is going to attempt to play, without understanding it, the social role which adults impose upon him. Only psychoanalysis will show us whether he stifles in his role, whether he seeks to escape it, or is entirely assimilated into it. Psychoanalysis alone allows us to discover the whole man in the adult; that is, not only his present determinations but also the weight of his history. And one would be entirely wrong in supposing that this discipline is opposed to dialectical materialism.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Critique of Dialectical Reason. 1960.

A city is a material and social organisation which derives its reality from the ubiquity of its absence. It is present in each one of its streets insofar as it is always elsewhere, and the myth of the capital with its mysteries demonstrates well that the opaqueness of direct human relations comes from this fact, that they are always conditioned by all others.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Critique of Dialectical Reason. 1960.

The superiority of Hegelian dogmatism, for those who believe in it, lies precisely in that part of it which we now reject – its idealism. For Hegel, the dialectic had no need to prove itself. In the first place Hegel took himself to be at the beginning of the end of History, that is to say, at that moment of Truth which is death. The time had come to judge, because in future the philosopher and his judgement would never be required again.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Hazel Barnes (Translator). Critique of Dialectical Reason. 1960.

France frightens no one; it no longer even has the means to intimidate: it’s beginning to horrify, and that is all.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Mitch Abidor (Translator). We Are All Assassins. 1958.

My purpose here is to offer a defence of existentialism against several reproaches that have been laid against it. First, it has been reproached as an invitation to people to dwell in quietism of despair. For if every way to a solution is barred, one would have to regard any action in this world as entirely ineffective, and one would arrive finally at a contemplative philosophy. Moreover, since contemplation is a luxury, this would be only another bourgeois philosophy. This is, especially, the reproach made by the Communists.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Philip Mairet (Translator). Existentialism Is a Humanism. 1946.

...existentialism, in our sense of the word, is a doctrine that does render human life possible; a doctrine, also, which affirms that every truth and every action imply both an environment and a human subjectivity.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Philip Mairet (Translator). Existentialism Is a Humanism. 1946.

A columnist in Clartes signs himself “The Existentialist,” and, indeed, the word is now so loosely applied to so many things that it no longer means anything at all. It would appear that, for the lack of any novel doctrine such as that of surrealism, all those who are eager to join in the latest scandal or movement now seize upon this philosophy in which, however, they can find nothing to their purpose. For in truth this is of all teachings the least scandalous and the most austere: it is intended strictly for technicians and philosophers.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Philip Mairet (Translator). Existentialism Is a Humanism. 1946.

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 or, as Heidegger has it, the human reality.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Philip Mairet (Translator). Existentialism Is a Humanism. 1946.

There is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Philip Mairet (Translator). Existentialism Is a Humanism. 1946.

The first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders. And, when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Philip Mairet (Translator). Existentialism Is a Humanism. 1946.

What do we mean by anguish? – The existentialist frankly states that man is in anguish. His meaning is as follows: When a man commits himself to anything, fully realising that he is not only choosing what he will be, but is thereby at the same time a legislator deciding for the whole of mankind – in such a moment a man cannot escape from the sense of complete and profound responsibility. There are many, indeed, who show no such anxiety. But we affirm that they are merely disguising their anguish or are in flight from it.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Philip Mairet (Translator). Existentialism Is a Humanism. 1946.

Dostoevsky once wrote: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse. For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism – man is free, man is freedom. Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimise our behaviour. Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. – We are left alone, without excuse.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Philip Mairet (Translator). Existentialism Is a Humanism. 1946.

Quietism is the attitude of people who say, “let others do what I cannot do.” The doctrine I am presenting before you is precisely the opposite of this, since it declares that there is no reality except in action.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Philip Mairet (Translator). Existentialism Is a Humanism. 1946.

All kinds of materialism lead one to treat every man including oneself as an object – that is, as a set of pre-determined reactions, in no way different from the patterns of qualities and phenomena which constitute a table, or a chair or a stone. Our aim is precisely to establish the human kingdom as a pattern of values in distinction from the material world.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Philip Mairet (Translator). Existentialism Is a Humanism. 1946.

What is at the very heart and center of existentialism, is the absolute character of the free commitment, by which every man realises himself in realising a type of humanity – a commitment always understandable, to no matter whom in no matter what epoch – and its bearing upon the relativity of the cultural pattern which may result from such absolute commitment.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Philip Mairet (Translator). Existentialism Is a Humanism. 1946.

Whenever a man chooses his purpose and his commitment in all clearness and in all sincerity, whatever that purpose may be, it is impossible for him to prefer another. It is true in the sense that we do not believe in progress. Progress implies amelioration; but man is always the same, facing a situation which is always changing, and choice remains always a choice in the situation. The moral problem has not changed since the time when it was a choice between slavery and anti-slavery
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Philip Mairet (Translator). Existentialism Is a Humanism. 1946.

Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the value of it is nothing else but the sense that you choose. Therefore, you can see that there is a possibility of creating a human community.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Philip Mairet (Translator). Existentialism Is a Humanism. 1946.

Man is all the time outside of himself: it is in projecting and losing himself beyond himself that he makes man to exist; and, on the other hand, it is by pursuing transcendent aims that he himself is able to exist. Since man is thus self-surpassing, and can grasp objects only in relation to his self-surpassing, he is himself the heart and center of his transcendence. There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Philip Mairet (Translator). Existentialism Is a Humanism. 1946.

Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position. Its intention is not in the least that of plunging men into despair. And if by despair one means as the Christians do – any attitude of unbelief, the despair of the existentialists is something different. Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God. In this sense existentialism is optimistic. It is a doctrine of action, and it is only by self-deception, by confining their own despair with ours that Christians can describe us as without hope.
Sartre, Jean-Paul and Philip Mairet (Translator). Existentialism Is a Humanism. 1946.

Hell is other people.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. No Exit. 1944.