Daily Inspiration Quote by Jean-Paul Sartre

A philosopher’s lament disguised as a mic-drop: Sartre compresses the 20th century’s swagger about “progress” into a single, sour punchline. “Everything has been figured out” isn’t praise; it’s a deadpan indictment of a culture that can map atoms, rationalize economies, and systematize knowledge while remaining morally and existentially incompetent. The line works because it stages a collision between two kinds of intelligence: the technical (how the world functions) and the existential (how a person ought to exist inside it). Sartre treats that gap not as an oversight but as the defining scandal of modernity.

The subtext is pure existentialism: there is no instruction manual for being. If “how to live” were solvable like an equation, freedom would be a bureaucratic procedure, not a burden. Sartre’s project hinges on the opposite idea: humans are condemned to choose, and every choice is made without the comfort of cosmic guarantees. So the quote sneers at the fantasy that expertise can replace responsibility. It also targets bad faith - the temptation to hide behind systems, roles, or “the way things are” to avoid owning one’s choices.

Context matters: postwar Europe, after ideology and rational administration had produced mechanized slaughter. The confidence of Enlightenment reason looks obscene next to the moral wreckage. Sartre’s sentence is short because the accusation is simple: we built answers faster than we built selves.