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Quotes from Nausea — Jean-Paul Sartre

1905–1980 France

← All quotes by Jean-Paul Sartre

21 quotes

Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound and secret delirium of nature — could explain it.

Nausea (1938)

This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it.

Nausea (1938)

I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.

Nausea (1938)

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

Nausea (1938)

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

Nausea (1938)

As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.

Nausea (1938)

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

Nausea (1938)

How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?

Nausea (1938)

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

Nausea (1938)

People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?

Nausea (1938)

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?

Nausea (1938)

The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.

Nausea (1938)

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.

Nausea (1938)

I wanted for the moments in my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. It would be just as well to try to catch time by the tail.

Nausea (1938)

My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think ... and I can't prevent myself from thinking.

Nausea (1938)

I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.

Nausea (1938)

The past is the luxury of proprietors.

Nausea (1938)

I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.

Nausea (1938)

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.

Nausea (1938)

You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it.

Nausea (1938)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Jean-Paul Sartre (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.