"Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish
it from a defeat."
"One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is
there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are
nothing other than your life."
"One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours
a day."
"One is still what one is going to cease to be and already
what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life."
"Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat."
"Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices."
"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."
"My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking.
I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking."
"Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary
characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor."
"She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her
from being an atheist."
"That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole
being cries out for God I cannot forget."
"The best work is not what is most difficult for you;
it is what you do best."
"The poor don't know that their function in life is to
exercise our generosity."
"There are two types of poor people, those who are poor
together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the
others are rich people out of luck."
"There is only one day left, always starting over: it
is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk."
"A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost."
"Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities
and adding some of your own experience."
"Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word:
I must look too intelligent to keep it."
"All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle
doomed to failure."
"All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned
in books."
"As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests
me, but what they can become."
"Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is."
"Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than
men who run away."
"Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances
of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating
situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry."
"Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make
abstract that which is concrete."
"Existence precedes and rules essence."
"Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims,
but by the way it kills them."
"Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it
is that I no longer have anything to fear."
"For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary
and sufficient for one to recount it."
"Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives."
Written by Jean-Paul Sartre
