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He Is Always Becoming, And If It Were Not For The Contingency Of Death, He Would Never End.

-Jean-Paul Sartre

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He Is Always Becoming,

Jean-Paul Sartre

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He Is Always Becoming, And If It Were Not For The Contingency Of Death, He Would Never End.

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The Plight Of Modern Man Is That He Is Condemmed To Be Free.

A Man Is Always A Teller Of Tales, He Lives Surrounded By His Stories And The Stories Of Others, He Sees Everything That Happens To Him Through Them; And He Tries To Live His Life As If He Were Recounting It.

All-powerful God, Who Am I But The Fear That I Inspire In Others?

God Is Absence. God Is The Solitude Of Man.

We Are Our Choices.

We Do Not Judge The People We Love.

I Enjoy Feeling Fastidious And Aloof. I Enjoy Saying No, Always No, And I Should Be Afraid Of Any Attempt To Construct A Finally Habitable World, Because I Should Merely Have To Say - Yes; And Act Like Other People.

It Is Certain That We Cannot Escape Anguish, For We Are Anguish.

In The State I Was In, If Someone Had Come And Told Me I Could Go Home Quietly, That They Would Leave Me My Life Whole, It Would Have Left Me Cold: Several Hours Or Several Years Of Waiting Is All The Same When You Have Lost The Illusion Of Being Eternal.

He Was Free, Free In Every Way, Free To Behave Like A Fool Or A Machine, Free To Accept, Free To Refuse, Free To Equivocate; To Marry, To Give Up The Game, To Drag This Death Weight About With Him For Years To Come. He Could Do What He Liked, No One Had The Right To Advise Him, There Would Be For Him No Good Or Evil Unless He Thought Them Into Being.

You Are -- Your Life, And Nothing Else.

One Cannot Become A Saint When One Works Sixteen Hours A Day.

Man Is Nothing Else But What He Makes Of Himself.

A Human Being Who Wakened In The Morning With A Queesy Stomach, With Fifteen Hours To Kill Before Next Bedtime, Had Not Much Use For Freedom.

Introspection Is Always Retrospection

I Was A Neophyte In Another World [in 1954].

To Read A Poem In January Is As Lovely As To Go For A Walk In June

There It Is: I Am Gently Slipping Into The Water's Depths, Towards Fear.

Man Is Condemned To Be Free; Because Once Thrown Into The World, He Is Responsible For Everything He Does.

This Then Is The Age Of Reason.

When The Rich [and Politically Powerful] Make War, It's The Poor [and Politically Weak] Who Die.

Happiness Has To Be Installed In Each Person As A State Of Affairs Completely Cut Off From The Process That Brought It About And, In Particular, From The Real Situation. Man Has To Be Affected With Happiness. It Is A Tonality Given To Him. Contradiction: If One Does Take Care To Give Him Happiness, It Is Because He Is A Free Creature--but In Order To Give It To Him, One Turns Him Into An Object.

The Consciousness That Says 'i Am' Is Not The Consciousness That Thinks.

To Keep Hope Alive One Must, In Spite Of All Mistakes, Horrors, And Crimes, Recognize The Obvious Superiority Of The Socialist Camp.

Life Has No Meaning The Moment You Lose The Illusion Of Being Eternal.

I Don't Know. Everything. Living. Smoking.

If I Relegate Impossible Salvation To The Prop Room, What Remains? A Whole Man, Composed Of All Men And As Good As All Of Them And No Better Than Any.

I Have Always Been Happy. Even If I Had Been More Honest With Regard To Myself At That Moment I Should Still Have Written La Nausee.

The Way, Applicable In Our Non-revolutionary Societies, To Prepare For The Time When Everyone Will Read, Is To Pose Problems In The Most Radical And Intransigent Manner. This Is What Alain Badiou Has Just Done In Almagestes, Where He Puts Language On Trial With An Intention Of Cleansing, Of Catharsis.

It Is Too Early To Love. We Will Buy The Right To Do So By Shedding Blood.

The Status Of 'native' Is A Nervous Condition Introduced And Maintained By The Settler Among Colonized People With Their Consent.

Il N'y A Pas D'autre Univers Qu'un Univers Humain, L'univers De La Subjectivite Humaine. There Is No Other Universe Except The Human Universe, The Universe Of Human Subjectivity.

Generally Speaking There Is No Irreducible Taste Or Inclination. They All Represent A Certain Appropriative Choice Of Being. It Is Up To Existential Psychoanalysis To Compare And Classify Them. Ontology Abandons Us Here; It Has Merely Enabled Us To Determine The Ultimate Ends Of Human Reality, Its Fundamental Possibilities, And The Value Which Haunts It.

There Is No Salvation Anywhere. The Idea Of Salvation Implies The Idea Of An Absolute.

The Form [of Literature] Matters Little To Me, Classical Or Not.

The Writer Is Committed When He Plunges To The Very Depths Of Himself With The Intent To Disclose, Not His Individuality, But His Person In The Complex Society That Conditions And Supports Him.

Your Judgement Judges You And Defines You

One Could Only Damage Oneself Through The Harm One Did To Others. One Could Never Get Directly At Oneself.

As Long As The Writer Cannot Write For The Two Billion Men Who Are Hungry, He Will Be Oppressed By A Feeling Of Malaise.

When My Relations With The Communist Party Gave Me The Necessary Perspective I Decided To Write My Autobiography. I Wanted To Show How A Man Can Pass From Literature Held Sacred To Action Which Nevertheless Remains That Of An Intellectual.

Total War Is No Longer War Waged By All Members Of One National Community Against All Those Of Another. It Is Total... Because It May Well Involve The Whole World.

What Do You Want To Do With The [communist] Party? A Racing Stable? What Good Is It To Sharpen A Knife Every Day If You Never Useit For Slicing? A Party Is Never More Than A Means. There Is Only One Objective: Power.

At Times Discreetly, At Times Disgustingly, I Yielded To The Most Fatal Temptation Whenever I Could No Longer Bear It: As A Result Of Impatience, Orpheus Lost Eurydice; As A Result Of Impatience, I Lost Myself.

Through The Lack Of Attaching Myself To Words, My Thoughts Remain Nebulous Most Of The Time. They Sketch Vague, Pleasant Shapes And Then Are Swallowed Up; I Forget Them Almost Immediately.

Man Is Fully Responsible For His Nature And His Choices.

As For Me, I Am Mean: That Means That I Need The Suffering Of Others To Exist. A Flame. A Flame In Their Hearts. When I Am All Alone, I Am Extinguished.

Man's Existence Precedes His Essence

Because We Can Imagine, We Are Free.

I Am A Man, Jupiter, And Each Man Must Invent His Own Path.

It Is Better; Heavier, Crueler. The Mouth You Wear For Hell.

I Have Nothing But Contempt For You Idiotic Chosen Ones Who Have The Heart To Rejoice When There Are The Damned In Hell And The Poor On Earth; As For Me, I Am On The Side Of Men And I Will Not Leave It.

You Must Be Afraid, My Son. That Is How One Becomes An Honest Citizen.

I Wrote In Les Mots That "i Have Often Thought Against Myself." That Sentence Has Not Been Understood Either. Critics Have Seen In It A Confession Of Masochism. But That Is How One Should Think: Revolting Against Everything "inculcated'' That One May Have Within Oneself.

All Human Actions Are Equivalent... And All Are On Principle Doomed To Failure.

Ah! Yes, I Know: Those Who See Me Rarely Trust My Word: I Must Look Too Intelligent To Keep It.

The Sun Is Not Ridiculous, Quite The Contrary. On Everything I Like, On The Rust Of The Construction Girders, On The Rotten Boards Of The Fence, A Miserly, Uncertain Light Falls, Like The Look You Give, After A Sleepless Night, On Decisions Made With Enthusiasm The Day Before, On Pages You Have Written In One Spurt Without Crossing Out A Word.

I Do Not Believe In God; His Existence Has Been Disproved By Science. But In The Concentration Camp, I Learned To Believe In Men.

Man Can Will Nothing Unless He Has First Understood That He Must Count On No One But Himself; That He Is Alone, Abandoned On Earth In The Midst Of His Infinite Responsibilities, Without Help, With No Other Aim Than The One He Sets Himself, With No Other Destiny Than The One He Forges For Himself On This Earth.

Criticism Often Takes From The Tree Caterpillars And Blossoms Together.

I Discovered Suddenly That Alienation, Exploitation Of Man By Man, Under-nourishment, Relegated To The Background Metaphysical Evil Which Is A Luxury.

No Finite Point Has Meaning Without An Infinite Reference Point.

I Tell You In Truth: All Men Are Prophets Or Else God Does Not Exist.

Nothing Happens While You Live. The Scenery Changes, People Come In And Go Out, That's All. There Are No Beginnings. Days Are Tacked On To Days Without Rhyme Or Reason, An Interminable, Monotonous Addition.

Freedom Is Existence, And In It Existence Precedes Essence.

I Suppose It Is Out Of Laziness That The World Is The Same Day After Day. Today It Seemed To Want To Change. And Then Anything, Anything Could Happen.

I Am Neither Virgin Nor Priest Enough To Play With The Inner Life.

Be Quiet! Anyone Can Spit In My Face, And Call Me A Criminal And A Prostitute. But No One Has The Right To Judge My Remorse.

We Will Not Go To Heaven,goetz, And Even If We Both Entered It, We Would Not Have Eyes To See Each Other, Nor Hands To Touch Each Other. Up There, God Gets All The Attention.... We Can Only Love On This Earth And Against God.

Philosophy Which Does Not Help To Illuminate The Process Of The Liberation Of The Oppressed Should Be Rejected.

Like Morality, Literature Needs To Be Universal. So That The Writer Must Put Himself On The Side Of The Majority, Of The Two Billion Starving, If He Wishes To Be Able To Speak To All And Be Read By All. Failing That, He Is At The Service Of A Privileged Class And, Like It, An Exploiter.

Everything Is Gratuitous, This Garden, This City And Myself. When You Suddenly Realize It, It Makes You Feel Sick And Everything Begins To Drift . . . That's Nausea.

What I See Is Teeming Cohesion, Contained Dispersal... For Him, To Sculpt Is To Take The Fat Off Space.

To Be Responsible Is To Be The Uncontested Author Of An Event Or Thing.

Being Responsible

In A Word, Man Must Create His Own Essence: It Is In Throwing Himself Into The World, Suffering There, Struggling There, That He Gradually Defines Himself.

The Aim Of Language...is To Communicate...to Impart To Others The Results One Has Obtained...as I Talk, I Reveal The Situation...i Reveal It To Myself And To Others In Order To Change It.

In Any Case, If You Ever Leave Me With A Handsome Man, Do Not Tell Me That You Trust Me Because, Let Me Warn You: That Is Not What Will Prevent Me From Deceiving You, If I Want To. On The Contrary.

Death Is A Continuation Of My Life Without Me.

I Wanted Pure Love: Foolishness; To Love One Another Is To Hate A Common Enemy: I Will Thus Espouse Your Hatred. I Wanted Good: Nonsense; On This Earth And In These Times, Good And Bad Are Inseparable: I Accept To Be Evil In Order To Become Good.

To Whomever Gives A Kiss Or A Blow Render A Kiss Or Blow But To Whomever Gives When You Are Unable To Return Offer All The Hatred In Your Heart For You Were Slaves And He Enslaves You

If Literature Isn't Everything, It's Not Worth A Single Hour Of Someone's Trouble.

There Is A Universe Behind And Before Him. And The Day Is Approaching When Closing The Last Book On The Last Shelf On The Far Left; He Will Say To Himself, "now What?

She Smiled And Said With An Ecstatic Air: "it Shines Like A Little Diamond", "what Does?" "this Moment. It Is Round, It Hangs In Empty Space Like A Little Diamond; I Am Eternal.

God Is The Solitude Of Men. There Was Only Me: I Alone Decided To Commit Evil; Alone, I Invented Good. I Am The One Who Cheated, I Am The One Who Performed Miracles, I Am The One Accusing Myself Today, I Alone Can Absolve Myself; Me, The Man.

If You Are Lonely When You're Alone, You Are In Bad Company.

I Am Alone In The Midst Of These Happy, Reasonable Voices. All These Creatures Spend Their Time Explaining, Realizing Happily That They Agree With Each Other. In Heaven's Name, Why Is It So Important To Think The Same Things All Together.

Acting Is Happy Agony.

As Far As Men Go, It Is Not What They Are That Interests Me, But What They Can Become.

Man Is Condemned To Be Free

To Think New Thoughts You Have To Break The Bones In Your Head

I Maintain That Inversion Is The Effect Of Neither A Prenatal Choice Nor An Endocrinal Malformation Nor Even The Passive And Determined Result Of Complexes. It Is An Outlet That A Child Discovers When He Is Suffocating.

Man Is What He Wills Himself To Be.

When Rich People Fight Wars With One Another, Poor People Are The Ones To Die.

Either The Ussr Was Not The Country Of Socialism, In Which Case Socialism Didn't Exist Anywhere And Doubtless, Wasn't Possible: Or Else, Socialism Was That, This Abominable Monster, This Police State, The Power Of Beasts Of Prey.

Listen To Me: A Family Man Is Never A Real Family Man. An Assassin Is Never Entirely Assassin. They Play A Role, You Understand. While A Dead Man, He Is Really Dead. To Be Or Not To Be, Right?

Man Is Always A Wizard To Man, And The Social World Is At First Magical.

For The Time Being I Have Seen Enough Of Living Things, Of Dogs, Of Men, Of All Flabby Masses Which Move Spontaneously.

Some Of These Days, Oh, You'll Miss Me Honey

There Is No Book Of Mine That I Reject. That Does Not Mean That I Find Them Good.

Criminals Together. We're In Hell, My Little Friend, And There's Never Any Mistake There. People Are Not Damned For Nothing.

But I Must Finally Realize That I Am Subject To These Sudden Transformations. The Thing Is That I Rarely Think; A Crowd Of Small Metamorphoses Accumulate In Me Without My Noticing It, And Then, One Fine Day, A Veritable Revolution Takes Place.

Genius Is What A Man Invents When He Is Looking For A Way Out.

Night Is Falling: At Dusk, You Must Have Good Eyesight To Be Able To Tell The Good Lord From The Devil.

If A Jew Is Fascinated By Christians It Is Not Because Of Their Virtues, Which He Values Little, But Because They Represent Anonymity, Humanity Without Race.

Something Begins In Order To End: An Adventure Doesn't Let Itself Be Extended It Achieves Significance Only Through Its Death.

It Is Not Right, My Fellow-countrymen, You Who Know Very Well All The Crimes Committed In Our Name. It's Not At All Right That You Do Not Breathe A Word About Them To Anyone, Not Even To Your Own Soul, For Fear Of Having To Stand In Judgment Of Yourself. I Am Willing To Believe That At The Beginning You Did Not Realize What Was Happening; Later, You Doubted Whether Such Things Could Be True; But Now You Know, And Still You Hold Your Tongues.

So That Is What Hell Is. I Would Never Have Believed It. You Remember: The Fire And Brimstone, The Torture. Ah! The Farce. There Is No Need For Torture: Hell Is Other People.

It Was Odd, He Thought, That A Man Could Hate Himself As Though He Were Someone Else.

The Best Work Is Not What Is Most Difficult For You; It Is What You Do Best.

It Disturbs Me No More To Find Men Base, Unjust, Or Selfish Than To See Apes Mischievous, Wolves Savage, Or The Vulture Ravenous.

Everything Has Been Figured Out, Except How To Live.

You Know How Much I Admire Che Guevara. In Fact, I Believe That The Man Was Not Only An Intellectual But Also The Most Complete Human Being Of Our Age: As A Fighter And As A Man, As A Theoretician Who Was Able To Further The Cause Of Revolution By Drawing His Theories From His Personal Experience In Battle.

What Is Not Possible Is Not To Choose.

Generosity Is Nothing Else Than A Craze To Possess. All Which I Abandon, All Which I Give, I Enjoy In A Higher Manner Through The Fact That I Give It Away. To Give Is To Enjoy Possessively The Object Which One Gives.

Neither Sex, Without Some Fertilization Of The Complimentary Characters Of The Other, Is Capable Of The Highest Reaches Of Human Endeavor.

The More One Is Absorbed In Fighting Evil, The Less One Is Tempted To Place The Good In Question.

A Good Hanging Now And Then -- That Entertains Folk In The Provinces And Robs Death Of Its Glamour.

We Are Possessed By The Things We Possess. When I Like An Object, I Always Give It To Someone. It Isn't Generosity-it's Only Because I Want Others To Be Enslaved By Objects, Not Me.

Heroism Is Not To Be Won At The Point Of A Pen.

I Needed To Justify My Existence, And I Had Made An Absolute Of Literature. It Took Me Thirty Years To Get Rid Of This State Of Mind.

There Are Photographers Who Push For War Because They Make Stories. They Search For A Chinese Who Has A More Chinese Are Than The Others And They End Up Finding One. They Have Him Take A Typically Chinese Pose And Surround Him With Chinoiseries. What Have They Captured On Their Film? A Chinese? Definitely Not: The Idea Of The Chinese.

The [communist] Party Has One Objective: The Creation Of A Socialist Economy; And One Means: The Utilization Of The Class Struggle.

Once You Hear The Details Of Victory, It Is Hard To Distinguish It From A Defeat.

Man Is Abandoned On Earth In The Midst Of His Infinite Responsibilities, Without Help, With No Aim But What He Sets Himself.

I Believe, I Desire, That Social And Economic Ills May Be Remedied.

What The Painter Adds To The Canvas Are The Days Of His Life. The Adventure Of Living, Hurtling Toward Death.

Philosophy Appears To Some People As A Homogenous Milieu: There Thoughts Are Born And Die, There Systems Are Built, And There, In Turn, They Collapse. Others Take Philosophy For A Specific Attitude Which We Can Freely Adopt At Will. Still Others See It As A Determined Segment Of Culture. In Our View Philosophy Does Not Exist.

When I Can't See Myself In The Mirror, I Can't Even Feel Myself, And I Begin To Wonder If I Exist At All.

I Am Beginning To Believe That Nothing Can Ever Be Proved. These Are Honest Hypotheses Which Take The Facts Into Account: But I Sense So Definitely That They Come From Me, And That They Are Simply A Way Of Unifying My Own Knowledge. Not A Glimmer Comes From Rollebon's Side. Slow, Lazy, Sulky, The Facts Adapt Themselves To The Rigour Of The Order I Wish To Give Them; But It Remains Outside Of Them. I Have The Feeling Of Doing A Work Of Pure Imagination.

In Love, One And One Are One.

Man Is Nothing Else But What He Makes Of Himself. [it Is A Matter Of Choice, Not Chance.] Such Is The First Principle Of Existentialism.

Absurd, Irreducible; Nothing — Not Even A Profound And Secret Delirium Of Nature — Could Explain It. Obviously I Did Not Know Everything, I Had Not Seen The Seeds Sprout, Or The Tree Grow. But Faced With This Great Wrinkled Paw, Neither Ignorance Nor Knowledge Was Important: The World Of Explanations And Reasons Is Not The World Of Existence. A Circle Is Not Absurd, It Is Clearly Explained By The Rotation Of A Straight Segment Around One Of Its Extremities. But Neither Does A Circle Exist. This Root, On The Other Hand, Existed In Such A Way That I Could Not Explain It.

Un Homme N'est Rien D'autre Qu'une Se Rie D'entreprises. A Man Is No Other Than A Series Of Undertakings.

It Is Only In Our Decisions That We Are Important.

Things Are Entirely What They Appear To Be And Behind Them... There Is Nothing.

I Have Such A Desire To Sleep And Am So Much Behind My Sleep. A Good Night, One Good Night And All This Nonsense Will Be Swept Away.

I Must Be Without Remorse Or Regrets As I Am Without Excuse; For From The Instant Of My Upsurge Into Being, I Carry The Weight Of The World By Myself Alone Without Help, Engaged In A World For Which I Bear The Whole Responsibility Without Being Able, Whatever I Do, To Tear Myself Away From This Responsibility For An Instant.

Words There Is No Good Father, That's The Rule. Don't Lay The Blame On Men But On The Bond Of Paternity, Which Is Rotten. To Beget Children, Nothing Better; To Have Them, What Iniquity!

I Have Changed As Everyone Changes: Within A Permanency.

A Man Who Is Free Is Like A Mangy Sheep In A Herd. He Will Contaminate My Entire Kingdom And Ruin My Work.

To Eat Is To Appropriate By Destruction.

A Man Is Involved In Life, Leaves His Impress On It, And Outside Of That There Is Nothing.

Words Are Loaded Pistols.

Thought Provoking

If You Die, I Will Lie Down Beside You And I Will Stay There Until The End, Without Eating Or Drinking, You Will Rot In My Arms And I Will Love You As Carcass: For You Love Nothing If You Do Not Love Everything.

Existence Precedes And Rules Essence.

I Clung To Nothing, In A Way I Was Calm. But It Was A Horrible Calm—because Of My Body; My Body, I Saw With Its Eyes, I Heard With Its Ears, But It Was No Longer Me; It Sweated And Trembled By Itself And I Didn’t Recognize It Any More.

I Wanted My Own Words. But The Ones I Use Have Dragged Through I Don't Know How Many Consciences.

Every Age Has Its Own Poetry; In Every Age The Circumstances Of History Choose A Nation, A Race, A Class To Take Up The Torch By Creating Situations That Can Be Expressed Or Transcended Only Through Poetry.

I Had Been Playing With Matches And Burned A Small Rug. I Was In The Process Of Covering Up My Crime When Suddenly God Saw Me. I Felt His Gaze Inside My Head And On My Hands....i Flew Into A Rage Against So Crude An Indiscretion, I Blasphemed....he Never Looked At Me Again....i Had The More Difficulty Getting Rid Of Him The Holy Ghost In That He Had Installed Himself At The Back Of My Head....i Collared The Holy Ghost In The Cellar And Threw Him Out.

Like All Dreamers, I Mistook Disenchantment For Truth.

[andre] Gide Can Say It To Me: It Is A Writer's Morality Only Addressed To A Few Privileged People. For That Reason It No Longer Interests Me.

The More Absurd Life Is, The More Insupportable Death Is.

The World Would Get Along Very Well Without Literature. It Would Get Along Even Better Without Man.

The Lad Who Dreams Of Being A Boxing Champion Or An Admiral Chooses Reality. If The Writer Chooses The Imaginary, He Confuses The Two.

It Is Therefore Senseless To Think Of Complaining Since Nothing Foreign Has Decided What We Feel, What We Live, Or What We Are.

There Are Two Types Of Poor People, Those Who Are Poor Together And Those Who Are Poor Alone. The First Are The True Poor, The Others Are Rich People Out Of Luck.

Who Can Exhaust A Man? Who Knows A Man's Resources?

For The Artist, The Color, The Bouquet, The Tinkling Of The Spoon On The Saucer, Are Things In The Highest Degree. He Stops At The Quality Of The Sound Or The Form. He Returns To It Constantly And Is Enchanted With It.

Anything, Anything Would Be Better Than This Agony Of Mind, This Creeping Pain That Gnaws And Fumbles And Caresses One And Never Hurts Quite Enough.

The Past Is The Luxury Of Proprietors.

A Writer Must Refuse To Allow Himself To Be Transformed Into An Institution.

Words Are More Treacherous And Powerful Than We Think.

The For-itself, In Fact, Is Nothing But The Pure Nihilation Of The In-itself; It Is Like A Hole Of Being At The Heart Of Being.

Better A Good Journalist Than A Poor Assassin.

Good Journalism

What Do I Care About Jupiter? Justice Is A Human Issue, And I Do Not Need A God To Teach It To Me.

I Had Found My Religion: Nothing Seemed More Important To Me Than A Book. I Saw The Library As A Temple.

I Am. I Am, I Exist, I Think, Therefore I Am; I Am Because I Think, Why Do I Think? I Don't Want To Think Any More, I Am Because I Think That I Don't Want To Be, I Think That I . . . Because . . . Ugh!

All I Can Do Is Make The Best Of What I Am, Become Accustomed To It, Evaluate The Possibilities, And Take Advantage Of Them The Best I Can.

In The Nineteenth Century One Had To Give All Sorts Of Guarantees And Lead An Exemplary Life In Order To Cleanse Oneself In The Eyes Of The Bourgeois Of The Sin Of Writing, For Literature Is, In Essence, Heresy. The Situation Has Not Changed Except That It Is Now The Communists, That Is, The Qualified Representatives Of The Proletariat, Who As A Matter Of Principle Regard The Writer As Suspect.

It Is The Same: A Chosen One Is A Man Whom God's Finger Crushes Against The Wall.

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.

Ha! To Forget. How Childish! I Feel You In My Bones. Your Silence Screams In My Ears. You May Nail Your Mouth Shut, You May Cut Out Your Tongue, Can You Keep Yourself From Existing? Will You Stop Your Thoughts.

What Is Boredom? It Is When There Is Simultaneously Too Much And Not Enough.

With A Little Luck That Epoch May Arrive. I Am On The Side Of Those Who Think That Things Will Go Better When The World Has Changed.

I Had Realized In The Meantime That Action Too Has Its Difficulties, And That One Can Also Be Led To It By Neurosis. We Are Not Saved By Politics Any More Than By Literature.

Ah! How I Hate The Crimes Of The New Generation: They Are Dry And Sterile As Darnel.

Consciousness Is A Being The Nature Of Which Is To Be Conscious Of The Nothingness Of Its Being.

Everything In My Past, In My Training, Everything That Has Been Most Essential In My Activity Up To Now Has Made Me Above All A Man Who Writes, And It Is Too Late For That To Change.

Every Existing Thing Is Born Without Reason, Prolongs Itself Out Of Weakness, And Dies By Chance.

It Is Always More Valuable To Report The Truth.

I Considered Calmly That I Was Born To Write.

This Desire [to Write] Is Rather Strange All The Same And Is Not Without A Certain "cracked" Quality.

That Is Exactly The Writer's Problem. What Does Literature Stand For In A Hungry World?

What's Done At Night Belongs To The Night. In The Daytime You Don't Talk About It.

This Is The Basis For The Joy Of Love When There Is Joy; We Feel That Our Existence Is Justified.

Man Can Will Nothing Unless He Has First Understood That He Must Count On No One But Himself.

Let It Crumble! Let The Rocks Revile Me And Flowers Wilt At My Coming. Your Whole Universe Is Not Enough To Prove Me Wrong. You Are The King Of Gods, King Of Stones And Stars, King Of The Waves Of The Sea. But You Are Not The King Of Man.

People Who Live In Society Have Learnt How To See Themselves, In Mirrors, As They Appear To Their Friends. I Have No Friends: Is That Why My Flesh Is So Naked?

The Appearance Of The Other In The World Corresponds Therefore To A Congealed Sliding Of The Whole Universe.

Existence Is Prior To Essence.

Everything Comes To Us From Others. To Be Is To Belong To Someone.

I Am Alone In This White, Garden-rimmed Street. Alone And Free. But This Freedom Is Rather Like Death.

A Lost Battle Is A Battle One Thinks One Has Lost.

All I Want Is' - And He Uttered The Final Words Through Clenched Teeth And With A Sort Of Shame - 'to Retain My Freedom.' I Should Myself Have Thought,' Said Jacques, 'that Freedom Consisted In Frankly Confronting Situations Into Which One Had Deliberately Entered, And Accepting All One's Responsibilities. But That, No Doubt, Is Not Your View.

All The Same, They [books] Do Serve Some Purpose. Culture Doesn't Save Anything Or Anyone, It Doesn't Justify. But It's A Product Of Man: He Projects Himself Into It, He Recognizes Himself In It; That Critical Mirror Alone Offers Him His Image.

It Is Disgusting -- Why Must We Have Bodies?

I Want To Leave, To Go Somewhere Where I Should Be Really In My Place, Where I Would Fit In . . . But My Place Is Nowhere; I Am Unwanted.

What Is Meant Here By Saying That Existence Precedes Essence? It Means First Of All, Man Exists, Turns Up, Appears On The Scene, And, Only Afterwards, Defines Himself. If Man, As The Existentialist Conceives Him, Is Indefinable, It Is Because At First He Is Nothing. Only Afterward Will He Be Something, And He Himself Will Have Made What He Will Be.

The Recent Experiences Of Pocketbooks Prove This. I Have Changed My Public Since My Works Have Been Published In A Smaller Format.

I Exist. It's Sweet, So Sweet, So Slow. And Light: You'd Think It Floated All By Itself. It Stirs. It Brushes By Me, Melts And Vanishes. Gently, Gently. There Is Bubbling Water In My Mouth. I Swallow. It Slides Down My Throat, It Caresses Me — And Now It Comes Up Again Into My Mouth. For Ever I Shall Have A Little Pool Of Whitish Water In My Mouth - Lying Low - Grazing My Tongue. And This Pool Is Still Me. And The Tongue. And The Throat Is Me.

I Think Of Death Only With Tranquility, As An End. I Refuse To Let Death Hamper Life. Death Must Enter Life Only To Define It.

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