Jean-Paul Sartre — "To be is to choose oneself."
To be is to choose oneself.
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More from Jean-Paul Sartre
"Only the man who does not want to be free can escape the anguish of freedom."
"I do not give a damn about the dead. They died for the [Communist] Party and the Party can decide what it wants. I practice a live man's politics, for the living."
"Man is a being for whom existence is a question."
"The meaning of life is not something that is given to us, but something that we create for ourselves."
"We were never so free as under the German occupation."
About Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
French existentialist philosopher (Being and Nothingness, 1943) and Nobel literature laureate (refused, 1964) who shaped postwar French intellectual culture. Closely associated with Simone de Beauvoir (lifetime partner and existentialist co-founder) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (phenomenologist contemporary and Les Temps Modernes co-editor). For an intellectual contrast, see Albert Camus, Algerian-French novelist and philosopher — Once Sartre's closest collaborator, Camus broke with him publicly in 1952 over Soviet communism; Camus's moral-resistance liberalism and Sartre's revolutionary commitment became the two postwar French Left poles. The Sartre-Camus break is the canonical postwar French intellectual rupture — they argued whether revolutionary violence is ever justified, and never reconciled.
The standard scholarly entry points to Jean-Paul Sartre's work: Annie Cohen-Solal (French biographer, NYU) — Sartre: A Life (1985); Ronald Aronson (Wayne State University, philosophy) — Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship (2004); Bernard-Henri Lévy (French public philosopher) — Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century (2003). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Jean-Paul Sartre.