Being and Nothingness Quotes

“It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“Life is a useless passion.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“I must be without remorse or regrets as I am without excuse; for from the instant of my upsurge into being, I carry the weight of the world by myself alone without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.”
― Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“The appearance of the other in the world corresponds therefore to a congealed sliding of the whole universe.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“Nothingness carries being in its heart.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“Time gnaws and wears away; it separates; it flies. And by virtue of separation--by separating man from his pain or from the object of his pain--time cures.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“Temporality is obviously an organised structure, and these three so-called elements of time: past, present, future, must not be envisaged as a collection of 'data' to be added together...but as the structured moments of an original synthesis. Otherwise we shall immediately meet with this paradox: the past is no longer, the future is not yet, as for the instantaneous present, everyone knows that it is not at all: it is the limit of infinite division, like the dimensionless point.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“The recruit who reports for active duty at the beginning of the war can in some instances be afraid of death, but more often he is 'afraid of being afraid'; that is, he is filled with anguish before himself.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“From the very fact, indeed, that I am conscious of the motives which solicit my action, these motives are already transcendent objects from my consciousness, they are outside; in vain shall I seek to cling to them: I escape from them through my very existence. I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the affective and rational motives of my act: I am condemned to be free.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“We have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“To believe is to know that one believes, and to know that one believes is no longer to believe.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“man is a useless passion.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“Society demands that he limit himself to his function… There are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in what he is as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly elude his condition.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“The Other is the hidden death of my possibilities.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“Every belief is a belief that falls short; one never wholly believes what one believes.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“In irony a man annihilates what he posits within one and the same act; he leads us to believe in order not to be believed; he affirms to deny and denies to affirm; he creatives a positive object but it has no being other than its nothingness.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“The flesh is the pure contingency of presence.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“إن القاتل يخلِّد الوضع الثقيل الذي ارتكب جريمته من أجل إنهائه، وبدلًا من أن يتخلص من العلاقة الكريهة بينه وبين القتيل، إذ بالقتيل وقد أخذ مفتاح تلك العلاقة معه إلى القبر، وإذا الكراهية تتحول بالقتل إلى شعور بالإحباط دائم.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“I do not cease to experience my being-for-others; my possibilities do not cease to “die”, nor do the distances cease to unfold toward me in terms of the stairway where somebody “could” be, in terms of this dark corner where a human presence “could” hide. Better yet, if I tremble at the slightest noise, if each creak announces to me a look, this is because I am already in the state of being-looked-at.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“The only way to define its way of being is to say that it is; for the object does not conceal being but neither does it disclose it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“If the essence of appearance is an “appearing” that is no longer opposed to any being, there is a genuine problem of the being of this appearing. This is the problem with which we are concerned here, and it will be the point of departure for our investigations into being and nothingness.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“By replacing in this way a variety of oppositions with a single dualism that founds them all, have we gained or lost?”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“Similarly, a certain “power” returns to the phenomenon, inhabiting it and endowing it with its very transcendence: the power to be developed through a series of real or possible appearances.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“If a phenomenon is to show itself as transcendent, the subject himself must transcend the appearance toward the total series of which it is a member. He must grasp redness—i.e., the principle of the series—through his impression of red; the electric current through the electrolysis, etc. But if the object’s transcendence is grounded in the necessity that any appearance can be transcended, it follows axiomatically that the series of appearances for any object is posited as infinite.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“For the existent cannot be reduced to a finite series of manifestations, as each of these is a relationship to a constantly changing subject. While an object may only be given through a single “Abschattung,” the mere fact of being a subject implies the possibility of multiplying the points of view on to that “Abschattung.”9”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness