Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

The individual man tries to escape the race. And as soon as he ceases to represent the race, he represents man.

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

for in the absence of God he had found Man. Man killing man, man helping man, both of them anonymous: the scourge and the blessing.

Human, all too human.

It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind.

Humanity's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man - and the Word is with Men.

The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature. (Referenced in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young)

Whoever regards human beings as a herd and flees them as swiftly as he can will no doubt be overtaken by them and impaled on theirhorns.

Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition.

Death is part of who we are. It guides us. It shapes us. It drives us to madness. Can you still be human if you have no mortal end

Modern man-whether in the womb of the masses, or with his workmates, or with his family, or alone-can never for one moment forget that he is living in a world in which he is a means and whose end is not his business.

For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice but a stop in an organ pipe?

Men are but men; we did not make ourselves.

Part of knowing who we are is knowing we are not someone else. And Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, the agony we cannot feel, the death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other.

What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?

Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts.

I am human, all too bloody human.

All of us are what we have to be and everyone lives the kind of life its in him to live.

Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human.

Free man is by necessity insecure, thinking man by necessity uncertain.

Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.

It is part of the pholosophic dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves.

Everybody thinks of others as being excessively human, with all the frailties and crotchets appertaining to that curious condition. But each of us also seems to regard himself as existing on a detached plane of observation, exempt (save in moments of avid crisis) from the strange whims of humanity en masse.

I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings.