Certain details, somewhat curtailed, live in my memory. But I don't see anything anymore: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images, and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Commitment is an act, not a word

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Commitment is an act, not a word.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Concha would cry when she found out I was dead, she should have no taste for life for months afterward. But I was still the one who was going to die. I thought of her soft, beautiful eyes. When she looked at me something passed her to me. But I knew it was over: if she looked at me now the look would stay in her eyes, it wouldn't reach me. I was alone

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Couldn't I try... Naturally, it wouldn't be a question of a tune... But couldn't I in another medium?... It would have to be a book: I don't know how to do anything else. But not a history book: history talks about what has existed - an existent can never justify the existence of another existent. My mistake was to try to resuscitate Monsieur de Rollebon. Another kind of book. I don't quite know which kind - but you would have to guess, behind the printed words, behind the pages, something which didn't exist, which was above existence. The sort of story, for example, which could never happen, an adventure. It would have to be beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence. I am going, I feel irresolute. I dare not make a decision. If I were sure that I had talent...but I have never, never written anything of that sort; historical articles, yes - if you could call them that. A book. A novel. And there would be people who would read this novel and who would say: 'It was Antoine Quentin who wrote it, he was a red-headed fellow who hung about in cafés', and they would think that about my life as I think about the life of the Negress: as about something precious and almost legendary. A book. Naturally, at first it would only be a tedious, tiring job, it wouldn't prevent me from existing or from feeling that I exist. But a time would have to come when the book would be written, would be behind me, and I think that a little of its light would fall over my past. Then, through it, I might be able to recall my life without repugnance. Perhaps one day, thinking about this very moment, about this dismal moment at which I am waiting, round-shouldered, for it to be time to get on the train, perhaps I might feel my heart beat faster and say to myself: 'It was on that day, at that moment that it all started.' And I might succeed - in the past, simply in the past - in accepting myself.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Death is a continuation of my life without me...

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Emotion is first and in principle an accident

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

— Jean-Paul Sartre