"She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist."
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Jean-Paul Sartre quotes (page 4 of 24)
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"That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst."
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"The individual's duty is to do what he wants to do, to think whatever he likes, to be accountable to no one but himself, to challenge every idea and every person."
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"Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete."
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"I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves."
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"I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted."
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"It would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns...It goes, it goes ... and there's no end to it. It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I."
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"I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite."
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"What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be."
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"My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think… and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire."
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"It’s the well-behaved children that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don’t say a word, they don’t hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on, they make society pay dearly."
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"I do not think therefore I am a moustache"
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"In love, one and one are one."
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"Commitment is an act, not a word."
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"I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating."
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"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."
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"I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved. These are honest hypotheses which take the facts into account: but I sense so definitely that they come from me, and that they are simply a way of unifying my own knowledge. Not a glimmer comes from Rollebon's side. Slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves to the rigour of the order I wish to give them; but it remains outside of them. I have the feeling of doing a work of pure imagination."
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"Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have."
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"All I can do is make the best of what I am, become accustomed to it, evaluate the possibilities, and take advantage of them the best I can."
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"I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then anything, anything could happen."
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