I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

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?

Little flashes of sun on the surface of a cold, dark sea.

The individual's duty is to do what he wants to do, to think whatever he likes, to be accountable to no one but himself, to challenge every idea and every person.

Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.

Life has no meaning, the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.

I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.

I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'.

In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.

Existence is prior to essence.

Your judgement judges you and defines you

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

It is only in our decisions that we are important.

Perhaps its inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is.

I am myself and I am here.

To think new thoughts you have to break the bones in your head

I wanted my own words. But the ones I use have been dragged through I don't know how many consciences.

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.

I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.

I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

Life is a useless passion.

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.

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.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

I’ve dropped out of their hearts like a little sparrow fallen from its nest. So gather me up, dear, fold me to your heart – and you’ll see how nice I can be.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.

Acting is happy agony.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

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.

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

Death is a continuation of my life without me...

I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.

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.

Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

I do not think therefore I am a moustache

One could only damage oneself through the harm one did to others. One could never get directly at oneself.

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.

An individual chooses and makes himself.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of form a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all.