Jean-Paul Sartre on Life

"Life has no meaning a priori ... It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose."

"I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it."

"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."

"The worst of misfortunes is still a stroke of luck, since one feels oneself living when one experiences it/"

"If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light."

"Monsieur ... I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men."

"I do not give a damn about the dead. They died for the Party and the Party can decide what it wants. I practice a live man's politics, for the living."

"For those who want 'to change life", 'to reinvent love,' God is nothing but a hindrance."

"Some men are born committed to action: they do not have a choice, they have been thrown on a path, at the end of that path, an act awaits them, their act."

"The live dead-man is dead as a producer and alive insofar as he consumes"

"She smiled and said with an ecstatic air: "It shines like a little diamond","What does?""This moment. It is round, it hangs in empty space like a little diamond; I am eternal."

"In order to make myself recognized by the Other, I must risk my own life. To risk one's life, in fact, is to reveal oneself as not-bound to the objective form or to any determined existence — as not-bound to life."

"He is dead, and my hatred has died with him."

"But since he has decided to have the impossibility of living, every misfortune is an opportunity which lays this importance of living before his eyes and obliges him to decide, once again, to die."

"If you die, I will lie down beside you and I will stay there until the end, without eating or drinking, you will rot in my arms and I will love you as carcass: for you love nothing if you do not love everything."

"I know nothing, I am neither woman nor girl; I have been living in a dream and when someone kissed me, it made me want to laugh. Now I am here before you, it seems as though I have just awakened and it is morning."

"I, for my part, do not conceive an act as having causes, and I consider myself satisfied when I have found in it not its 'factors' but the general themes which it organizes: for our decisions gather into new syntheses and on new occasions the leitmotif that governs our life"

"I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary."

"He yawned. He had finished the day and he had also finished with his youth. Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism, smiling tolerance, resignation, common sense stoicism - all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life."

"But will be there, one hundred times denied, always there, dragging itself behind you. Then you will finally know that you have committed your life with one throw of the die, once and for all, and there is nothing you can do but tug our crime along until your death. Such is the law, just and unjust, of repentance. Then we will see what will become of your young pride."

"Quietism is the attitude of people who say, "let others do what I cannot do." The doctrine I am presenting before you is precisely the opposite of this, since it declares that there is no reality except in action. It goes further, indeed, and adds, "Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is." Hence we can well understand why some people are horrified by our teaching."