And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.

…but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.

Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.

...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.

Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you've lost that, you've lost everything.

To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.

What is an adult? A child blown up by age.

You have never had any confidence in him. And if he has no confidence in himself it is because he sees himself through your eyes.

All success cloaks a surrender

But women do not say 'We', except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say 'women', and women use the same word in referring to themselves.

I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.

The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.

He formed his sentences hesitantly and then threw them at me with such force that I felt as if I were receiving a present each time

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity no to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.

She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life.

I was very fond of Lagneau’s phrase: “I have no comfort but in my absolute despair.

I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.

It is so tiring to hate someone you love.

The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it.

To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.

The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.

A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into?

The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.

That the child is the supreme aim of woman is a statement having precisely the value of an advertising slogan.

A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man.

There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.

He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!

Ready-made phrases and the ritual of etiquette were unknown to him; his thoughtfulness was pure improvisation, and it resembled the little inventions affection inspires.

Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.

Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.

The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.

Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.

I went to get a detective story. You have to kill time. But time will kill me too - and there s the true, preestablished balance.

Man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it.

I tried to love you less.I couldn't.

There was still a question in her eyes-- one that she did not like to put into words.

Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects. pg. xxxiii

Mystery is never more than a mirage that vanishes as we draw near to look at it.

The truth is, however, that when two individuals detest each other, while being unable to get along without each other, it is not of all human relations the truest and most moving, but rather the most pitiable.

To paint, to write, to engage in politics—these are not merely ‘sublimations’; here we have aims that are willed for their own sakes. To deny it is to falsify all human history.

Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence.