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There Are Two Kinds Of Existentialist; First, Those Who Are Christian...and On The Other Hand The Atheistic Existentialists, Among Whom...i Class Myself. What They Have In Common Is That They Think That Existence Precedes Essence, Or, If You Prefer, That Subjectivity Must Be The Turning Point.

-Jean-Paul Sartre

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There Are Two Kinds

Jean-Paul Sartre

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There Are Two Kinds Of Existentialist; First, Those Who Are Christian...and On The Other Hand The Atheistic Existentialists, Among Whom...i Class Myself. What They Have In Common Is That They Think That Existence Precedes Essence, Or, If You Prefer, That Subjectivity Must Be The Turning Point.

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

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.

Some Men Are Born Committed To Action: They Do Not Have A Choice, They Have Been Thrown On A Path, At The End Of That Path, An Act Awaits Them, Their Act.

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.

Respectable Society Believed In God In Order To Avoid Having To Speak About Him.

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.

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

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

As If There Could Be True Stories: Things Happen In One Way, And We Retell Them In The Opposite Way.

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

We Do Not Wish To Say Only That A Man Is Responsible For His Own Individuality, But That He Is Responsible For That Of All Men.

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

Criticism Often Takes From The Tree Caterpillars And Blossoms Together.

I Committed The First Crime By Creating Men As Mortals. After That, What More Could You Do, You The Murderers? Come On; They Already Had Death In Them: At Most You Simply Hastened Things A Little.

The Worst Part About Being Lied To Is Knowing You Werent Worth The Truth

We Only Become What We Are By The Radical And Deep-seated Refusal Of That Which Others Have Made Of Us.

When We Love Animals And Children Too Much, We Love Them At The Expense Of Men.

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

What I Lacked [in La Nausee] Was A Sense Of Reality. I Have Changed Since. I Have Slowly Learned To Experience Reality.

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.

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

There Is Only One Day Left, Always Starting Over: It Is Given To Us At Dawn And Taken Away From Us At Dusk.

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

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’s The Well-behaved Children That Make The Most Formidable Revolutionaries. They Don’t Say A Word, They Don’t Hide Under The Table, They Eat Only One Piece Of Chocolate At A Time. But Later On, They Make Society Pay Dearly.

Every Word Has Consequences. Every Silence, Too.

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

But For Me There Is Neither Monday Nor Sunday: There Are Days Which Pass In Disorder, And Then, Sudden Lightning Like This One. Nothing Has Changed And Yet Everything Is Different. I Can't Describe It, It's Like The Nausea And Yet It's Just The Opposite: At Last An Adventure Happens To Me And When I Question Myself I See That It Happens That I Am Myself And That I Am Here; I Am The One Who Splits In The Night, I Am As Happy As The Hero Of A Novel.

So Much Torture, Bloodshed, Deceit. You Cannot Make Your Young People Practice Torture Twenty-four Hours A Day And Not Expect To Pay A Price For It.

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?

I Was Not The One To Invent Lies: They Were Created In A Society Divided By Class And Each Of Us Inherited Lies When We Were Born. It Is Not By Refusing To Lie That We Will Abolish Lies: It Is By Eradicating Class By Any Means Necessary.

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.

One Of The Chief Motives Of Artistic Creation Is Certainly The Need Of Feeling That We Are Essential In Relationship To The World.

Being Is. Being Is In-itself. Being Is What It Is.

Meaning Of Life

Man Is The Being Whose Project It Is To Be God.

No Finite Point Has Meaning Without An Infinite Reference Point.

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.

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

Man Is Not The Sum Of What He Has Already, But Rather The Sum Of What He Does Not Yet Have, Of What He Could Have.

I Am No Longer Sure Of Anything. If I Satiate My Desires, I Sin But I Deliver Myself From Them; If I Refuse To Satisfy Them, They Infect The Whole Soul.

Intellectuals Cannot Be Good Revolutionaries; They Are Just Good Enough To Be Assassins.

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

Life Gave Me Everything I Asked If All I Asked Was Not A Great Deal, That's My Problem!

[contemporary Writer] Could Be A Kind Of [samuel] Beckett Who Would Not Be Felt To Be Totally Committed To Despair.

Man Exists, Turns Up, Appears On The Scene And Only Afterwards, Defines Himself

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.

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.

Don't You Feel The Same Way? When I Cannot See Myself, Even Though I Touch Myself, I Wonder If I Really Exist.

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

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

I Can Receive Nothing More From These Tragic Solitudes Than A Little Empty Purity.

One Does Not Adopt A New Idea, One Slips Into It.

We Will Freedom For Freedom’s Sake, In And Through Particular Circumstances. And In Thus Willing Freedom, We Discover That It Depends Entirely Upon The Freedom Of Others And That The Freedom Of Others Depends Upon Our Own. Obviously, Freedom As The Definition Of A Man Does Not Depend Upon Others, But As Soon As There Is A Commitment, I Am Obliged To Will The Liberty Of Others At The Same Time As My Own. I Cannot Make Liberty My Aim Unless I Make That Of Others Equally My Aim.

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

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

In Football Everything Is Complicated By The Presence Of The Opposite Team.

L'homme Est Une Passion Inutile. Man Is A Useless Passion.

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

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

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.

Once We Know And Are Aware, We Are Responsible For Our Action And Our Inaction. We Can Do Something About It Or Ignore It. Either Way, We Are Still Responsible.

Yes, I Am So Free. And What A Superb Absence Is My Soul.

Many Young People Today Do Not Concern Themselves With Style. They Think That What One Says Should Be Said Simply And That Is All. For Me, Style - Which Does Not Exclude Simplicity, Quite The Opposite - Is Above All A Way Of Saying Three Or Four Things In One. There Is The Simple Sentence, With Its Immediate Meaning, And Then At The Same Time, Below This Immediate Meaning, Other Meanings Are Organized. If One Is Not Capable Of Giving Language This Plurality Of Meaning, Then It Is Not Worth The Trouble To Write.

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

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

I Have Changed As Everyone Changes: Within A Permanency.

Only The Guy Who Isn't Rowing Has Time To Rock The Boat.

Good Digestions, The Gray Monotony Of Provincial Life, And The Boredom-ah The Soul-destroying Boredom-of Long Days Of Mild Content.

What I Ask Of [the Writer] Is Not To Ignore The Reality And The Fundamental Problems That Exist. The World's Hunger, The Atomic Threat, The Alienation Of Man, I Am Astonished That They Do Not Color All Our Literature.

There Are Two Kinds Of Existentialist; First, Those Who Are Christian...and On The Other Hand The Atheistic Existentialists, Among Whom...i Class Myself. What They Have In Common Is That They Think That Existence Precedes Essence, Or, If You Prefer, That Subjectivity Must Be The Turning Point.

That Of War And Peace Or Of Almagestes. All Are Satisfactory. The Only Criterion Of A Work Is Its Validity: That It Should Grip And That It Should Last.

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.

You Must Be Like Me; You Must Suffer In Rhythm.

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.

I Wanted The Moments Of My Life To Follow And Order Themselves Like Those Of A Life Remembered. You Might As Well Try And Catch Time By The Tail.

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.

A Madman's Ravings Are Absurd In Relation To The Situation In Which He Finds Himself, But Not In Relation To His Madness.

Man Is Always Separated From What He Is By All The Breadth Of The Being Which He Is Not. He Makes Himself Known To Himself From The Other Side Of The World And He Looks From The Horizon Toward Himself To Recover His Inner Being.

Man Is Condemned To Be Free

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

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.

Hell Is For Other People.

Words Are Loaded Pistols.

Thought Provoking

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

Once Freedom Lights Its Beacon In Man's Heart, The Gods Are Powerless Against Him.

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

When The Rich Wage War, It's The Poor Who Die.

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.

I Receive Letters From Workers, From Secretaries. . . . They Are The Most Interesting Ones.

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.

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.

Our Responsibility Is Much Greater Than We Might Have Supposed, Because It Involves All Mankind.

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

I Have Always Been An Optimist, Perhaps Even Too Much.

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.

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

[m]an Is Condemned To Be Free. Condemned, Because He Did Not Create Himself, In Other Respect Is Free; Because, Once Thrown Into The World, He Is Responsible For Everything He Does. The Existentialist Does Not Believe In The Power Of Passion. He Will Never Agree That A Sweeping Passion Is A Ravaging Torrent Which Fatally Leads A Man To Certain Acts And Is Therefore An Excuse. He Thinks That Man Is Responsible For His Passion.

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.

When One Loves Animals And Children Too Much, One Loves Them Against Human Beings.

Three O'clock Is Always Too Late Or Too Early For Anything You Want To Do.

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

[lost Of The Absolute] Is In This Sense That ''i No Longer Know What To Do With My Life" Must Be Understood. Critics Have Been Mistaken About The Meaning Of This Phrase, Seeing In It A Cry Of Despair As In Simone De Beauvoir's "i Have Been Cheated." When She Uses This Word It Is To Indicate That She Claims From Life An Absolute Which She Cannot Find There.

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

It Is Enough That One Man Hate Another For Hate To Gain, Little By Little, All Mankind.

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

Il N'y A De Réalité Que Dans L'action. (there Is No Reality Except In Action.)

Better To Have Beasts That Let Themselves Be Killed Than Men Who Run Away.

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.

Therefore, In The Nature Of This Will For Freedom, Which Freedom Itself Implies, I May Pass Judgement On Those Who Seek To Hide From Themselves The Complete Arbitrariness And The Complete Freedom Of Their Existence.

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

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

I Am Finishing A Biography Of [gustave] Flaubert. Because He Is The Opposite Of What I Am. One Needs To Rub Up Against Argument.

I Had Dreamed My Life For Nearly Fifty Years (i Am About To Be Fifty-nine). But, You See, There Are Two Tones In Les Mats: The Echo Of This Condemnation And A Mitigation Of That Severity.

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

A Soviet Citizen, An Official Writer, Once Said To Me: "the Day When Communism (that Is, Well-being For Everyone) Reigns, Man's Tragedy Will Begin: His Finitude."

I Said To Myself, 'i Want To Die Decently'.

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.

The Poor Don't Know That Their Function In Life Is To Exercise Our Generosity.

It's Just What People Do When They're Getting Old, When They're Sick Of Themselves And Their Life; They Think Of Money And Take Care Of Themselves.

One Should Commit No Stupidity Twice, The Variety Of Choice Is, In The End, Large Enough.

It Answers The Question That Was Tormenting You: My Love, You Are Not 'one Thing In My Life' - Not Even The Most Important - Because My Life No Longer Belongs To Me Because...you Are Always Me.

Perception Is Naturally Surpassed Toward Action; Better Yet, It Can Be Revealed Only In And Through Projects Of Action. The World Is Revealed As An "always Future Hollow", For We Are Always Future To Ourselves.

Thus It Amounts To The Same Thing Whether One Gets Drunk Alone Or Is A Leader Of Nations.

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

Being Responsible

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.

Do You Think I Can Read [alain] Robbe-grillet In An Underdeveloped Country? He Does Not Feel Himself Maimed.

The Public, Too, Has To Make An Effort In Order To Understand The Writer Who, Though He Renounce Complacent Obscurity, Cannot Always Express His New-hidden Thoughts Lucidly And According To Accepted Models.

From The Period When I Wrote La Nausea I Wanted To Create A Morality. My Evolution Consists In My No Longer Dreaming Of Doing So.

I Entered The Communist Party Because Its Cause Was Just And I Will Leave It When It Ceases To Be Just.

You Are -- Your Life, And Nothing Else.

I Have No Religion, But If I Were To Choose One, It Would Be That Of Shariati's.

Why Do You Keep Maintaining Your Ideas Are Right If You Can't Prove Them?

It Is Not A Matter Of Indifference Whether We Like Oysters Or Clams, Snails Or Shrimp, If Only We Know How To Unravel The Existential Significance Of These Foods.

I Exist. It Is Soft, So Soft, So Slow. And Light: It Seems As Though It Suspends In The Air. It Moves.

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.

To Eat Is To Appropriate By Destruction.

To Believe Is To Know You Believe, And To Know You Believe Is Not To Believe.

I Never Could Bear The Idea Of Anyone's Expecting Something From Me. It Always Made Me Want To Do Just The Opposite.

Expecting Something

All That I Know About My Life, It Seems, I Have Learned In Books.

Man Is Fully Responsible For His Nature And His Choices.

I Know Only One Church: It Is The Society Of Men.

I Will Take It All: Tongs, Molten Lead, Prongs, Garrotes, All That Burns, All That Tears, I Want To Truly Suffer. Better One Hundred Bites, Better The Whip, Vitriol, Than This Suffering In The Head, This Ghost Of Suffering Which Grazes And Caresses And Never Hurts Enough.

I'm Going To Smile, And My Smile Will Sink Down Into Your Pupils, And Heaven Knows What It Will Become.

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

The Real Nature Of The Present Revealed Itself: It Was What Exists, All That Was Not Present Did Not Exist.

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

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.

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.

First All Men Must Be Able To Become Men By The Improvement Of Their Conditions Of Existence, So That A Universal Morality Can Be Created. If I Begin By Saying To Them: "thou Shalt Not Lie," There Is No Longer Any Possibility Of Political Action. What Matters First Is The Liberation Of Man.

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

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

If You Want To Deserve Hell, You Need Only Stay In Bed. The World Is Iniquity; If You Accept It, You Are An Accomplice, If You Change It You Are An Executioner.

Man Must Be Invented Each Day

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

[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 Revolution You Dream Of Is Not Ours. You Don't Want To Change The World; You Want To Blow It Up.

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

I Had Spent My Time Counterfeiting Eternity.

I Have Seen Children Dying Of Hunger. Over Against A Dying Child La Nausee Cannot Act As A Counterweight.

I Felt Myself In A Solitude So Frightful That I Contemplated Suicide. What Held Me Back Was The Idea That No One, Absolutely No One, Would Be Moved By My Death, That I Would Be Even More Alone In Death Than In Life.

Freedom Is Existence, And In It Existence Precedes Essence.

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

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

In Guinea I Could Read [franz] Kafka. I Re-discover In Him My Own Discomfort.

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.

[stéphane Mallarmé] Theory Of The Hermetic Is A Mistake, But He Can Be Only Difficult To Read When He Has Difficult Things To Say.

When One Does Nothing, One Believes Oneself Responsible For Everything.

I Will Not Be Modest. Humble, As Much As You Like, But Not Modest. Modesty Is The Virtue Of The Lukewarm.

He Loves Me, He Doesn't Love My Bowels, If They Showed Him My Appendix In A Glass He Wouldn't Recognize It, He's Always Feeling Me, But If They Put The Glass In His Hands He Wouldn't Touch It, He Wouldn't Think, "that's Hers," You Ought To Love All Of Somebody, The Esophagus, The Liver, The Intestines. Maybe We Don't Love Them Because We Aren't Used To Them, But If We Saw Them The Way We Saw Our Hands And Arms Maybe We'd Love Them; The Starfish Must Love Each Other Better Than We Do.

I Grow Warm, I Begin To Feel Happy. There Is Nothing Extraordinary In This, It Is A Small Happiness Of Nausea: It Spreads At The Bottom Of The Viscous Puddle, At The Bottom Of Out Time - The Time Of Purple Suspenders, And Broken Chair Seats; It Is Made Of White, Soft Instants, Spreading At The Edge, Like An Oil Stain. No Sooner Than Born, It Is Already Old, It Seems As Though I Have Known It For Twenty Years.

That God Does Not Exist, I Cannot Deny, That My Whole Being Cries Out For God I Cannot Forget.

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

Existence Is An Imperfection.

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.

The Absurd Man Will Not Commit Suicide; He Wants To Live, Without Relinquishing Any Of His Certainty, Without A Future, Without Hope, Without Illusions … And Without Resignation Either. He Stares At Death With Passionate Attention And This Fascination Liberates Him. He Experiences The “divine Irresponsibility” Of The Condemned Man.

Time Is Too Large, It Can't Be Filled Up. Everything You Plunge Into It Is Stretched And Disintegrates.

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

In Les Mots I Explain The Origin Of My Madness, Of My Neurosis. This Analysis May Help The Young Who Dream Of Writing.

When She Is Alone In The Rooms I Hear Her Humming To Keep Herself From Thinking.

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

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

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.

One Is Still What One Is Going To Cease To Be And Already What One Is Going To Become. One Lives One's Death, One Dies One's Life.

Existence Of Life

Imagination Is Not An Empirical Or Superadded Power Of Consciousness, It Is The Whole Of Consciousness As It Realizes Its Freedom.

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

Sometimes The Truth Is Too Simple For Intellectuals.

He Walked On In Silence, The Solitary Sound Of His Footsteps Echoing In His Head, As In A Deserted Street, At Dawn. His Solitude Was So Complete, Beneath A Lovely Sky As Mellow And Serene As A Good Conscience, Amid That Busy Throng, That He Was Amazed At His Own Existence; He Must Be Somebody Else's Nightmare, And Whoever It Was Would Certainly Awaken Soon.

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

Ideas Come In Pairs And They Contradict One Another; Their Opposition Is The Principal Engine Of Reflection.

How Can I, Who Was Not Able To Retain My Own Past, Hope To Save That Of Another?

I Think That Is The Big Danger In Keeping A Diary: You Exaggerate Everything.

Take [stéphane] Mallarme. I Hold Him To Be The Greatest Of French Poets, And I Have Taken Some Time To Understand Him !

She Suffers As A Miser. She Must Be Miserly With Her Pleasures, As Well. I Wonder If Sometimes She Doesn't Wish She Were Free Of This Monotonous Sorrow, Of These Mutterings Which Start As Soon As She Stops Singing, If She Doesn't Wish To Suffer Once And For All, To Drown Herself In Despair. In Any Case, It Would Be Impossible For Her: She Is Bound.

I Am Not Recommending "popular" Literature Which Aims At The Lowest.

Popular Literature

This [service To Oppressed] Is The Writer's Task, And, If He Fulfills It As He Should, He Acquires No Merit From It.

On My Way To The Office In The Morning, There Are, In Front Of Me, Behind Me, Other Men Going To Their Jobs. I See Them; If I Dared, I Would Smile At Them. I Think To Myself That I Am A Socialist, That They Are The Purpose Of My Life, Of My Efforts And That They Do Not Know It Yet.

Fascism Is Not Defined By The Number Of Its Victims, But By The Way It Kills Them.

If You Seek Authenticity For Authenticity's Sake You Are No Longer Authentic.

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

What Is Life But An Unpleasant Interruption To A Peaceful Nonexistence.

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