1. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was a heavy smoker, and reportedly smoked up to three packs of cigarettes per day.
2. He was a notorious womanizer and had numerous affairs, including a long-term relationship with the philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir.
3. Sartre was once arrested and imprisoned in Germany for participating in the French Resistance during World War II.
4. He was offered the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, but declined the honor, stating that he did not want to be “institutionalized.”
5. Sartre was an atheist, and his philosophy of existentialism was heavily influenced by the work of Friedrich Nietzsche.
7. Sartre was a vegetarian and involved in animal rights activism.
8. He was a left-wing political activist and supported Marxist ideology.
9. Sartre’s plays and novels were widely popular and were often performed in Parisian theaters.
10. He was born with a form of congenital blindness called retinitis pigmentosa, which caused him to have poor eyesight for most of his life.
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