Hello. I hope this is the right forum for my question. I am looking for the source of the Jean-Paul Sartre quote, “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” I have searched through several Sartre books, half a dozen quotation dictionaries, joined a message board dedicated to quotations, talked to my crazy existential friend, and of course Googled it, all to no avail. There are numerous people that attribute these words to Jean-Paul, but none give the original source. Perhaps he just tossed this sentence out in a lecture or interview once upon a time, and it just entered into the canon of well-known quotes? I don’t know. Since the SDMB plays host to the smartest and most well-read bunch group of people on the web, I was hoping somebody here could help me. Please? Thanks in advance.
I found one website that has the quote “Tout a été prévu, sauf comment vivre” attributed to Sartre. Translated, this is about the same as what you have quoted. Unfortunately, the site doesn’t mention the source, and I can’t find anything else on the web. Probably is a true Sartre quote, but also may be apocryphal.
Just realized that I didn’t read your OP closely enough, so my post above doesn’t add to what you already know. For what it’s worth, I went on the Project Gutenberg website, and none of his books is available there as e-texts, either in French or in English – probably for copyright reasons.
It certainly sounds like Sartre. If he didn’t say it, he meant to.
There’s 103 Sartre quotes on this page , but yours is not among them. I tried their search engine (many authors) with some permutations of the key words in Sal Ammoniac’s version, but no hits.
On the other hand, Sartre doesn’t even have an entry in Boller & George’s They Never Said It.
Well, thanks for trying all. I have not given up on my quest yet. Can’t really as I told a girl that it would be easy to find the source of this quotation. Next time I try to look good, I will just rush into a burning bus to save the nuns and orphans. I should have known this wouldn’t be easy. Les existentialistes damnables me posent toujours des problèmes. Surtout Jean-Paul. Anyway, even if I could find out that this is a false quote, it would be good, so long as I could trace it back to some kind of source. Thanks for trying, guys, and if somebody else would like to take a crack at this, by all means . . . 
I tried to search for the words in French on Google, too, with some variations, and got precious little as far as results. In English, I’ve gotten thousands of hits, but everyone I check out comes up with zero attribution. I do appreciate your effort, though.