Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom—ah the soul-destroying boredom—of long days of mild content.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Hell is—other people!

— Jean-Paul Sartre

He raised himself on his hands and looked at Irene's face: the nudity of that feminine body had risen into her face, the body had reabsorbed it, as nature reabsorbs forsaken gardens.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

He takes a few dazed steps, the waiters turn out the lights, and he slips into unconsciousness: when this man is lonely he sleeps.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else's nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

How come he cannot recognize his own cruelty now turned against him? How come he can't see his own savagery as a colonist in the savagery of these oppressed peasants who have absorbed it through every pore and for which they can find no cure? The answer is simple: this arrogant individual, whose power of authority and fear of losing it has gone to his head, has difficulty remembering he was once a man; he thinks he is a whip or a gun; he is convinced that the domestication of the "inferior races" is obtained by governing their reflexes. He disregards the human memory, the indelible reminders; and then, above all, there is this that perhaps he never knows: we only become what we are by radically negating deep down what others have done to us.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.

— Jean-Paul Sartre