Jean-Paul Sartre

The world is absurd, and we are condemned to make sense of it.

We are our anguish.

There is no love apart from the deeds of love; no love which is not a product of love.

The goal of life is to live it, and the goal of art is to show it.

If I didn't try to assume responsibility for my own existence, it would seem utterly absurd to go on existing.

Absurd, irreducible; nothing--not even a profound and secret delirium of nature--could explain [a tree root].

The more absurd life is, the more insupportable death is.

The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusions … and without resignation either.

I burst out laughing at the thought of the face he would make. The Self-Taught Man looks at me with surprise. I'd like to stop but I can't; I laugh until I cry.

Once they have slept together they will have to find something else to veil the enormous absurdity of their existence.

I have led a toothless life, he thought. A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on—and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.

It was odd, he thought, that a man could hate himself as though he were someone else.

We will freedom for freedom's sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own.

There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.

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.

When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

Everything that exists is born for no reason, continues through weakness and dies by chance.

The essential thing is to be free, free, free. To be free for life and for death.