Amuse yourself, torment your desires. Drink when you're thirsty -- that would be very much too simple! If you didn't harbor a temptation eternally in your soul, you'd run the risk of forgetting yourself.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

At an age when most children are playing hopscotch or with their dolls, you, poor child, who had no friends or toys, you toyed with dreams of murder, because that is a game to play alone.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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....

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Be self-indulgent, and those who are also self-indulgent will like you. Tear your neighbor to pieces, and the other neighbors will laugh. But if you beat your soul, all souls will cry out.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

But I can't see anything anymore: however much I search the past I can only retrieve scraps of images, and I am not sure what they represent, nor whether they are remembered or invented.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

But no: he was empty, he was confronted by a vast anger, a desperate anger, he saw it and could almost have touched it. But it was inert - if it were to live and find expression and suffer, he must lend it his own body. It was other people's anger. "Swine!" He clenched his fists, he strode along, but nothing came, the anger remained external to himself.

— Jean-Paul Sartre