...freedom only gives you something to be sorry for.
If [literature] should turn into pure propaganda or pure entertainment, society will slip back into the sty of the immediate -- which is to say, the memoryless existence of hymenoptera and gastropods....
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.
Certain details, somewhat curtailed, live in my memory. But I don't see anything anymore: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, w...
Wait a minute, there's a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why, now, should it be disagreeable?...Ah,I see; it's life without a break.
Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.
The essential thing is contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity. To exist is simply to be there; those who exist let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce anythi...
Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.
It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.
We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seeded refusal of that which others have made of us.
There are two ways to go to the gas chamber, free and not free.
Nothing can interrupt it yet all can break it.
Madame Picard believed that a child should be allowed to read anything: 'A book never does any harm if it is well written.' While she was there, I had once asked permission to read Madame Bovary and m...
I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.
I admire the way we can lie, putting reason on our side.
Every belief is a belief that falls short; one never wholly believes what one believes.
To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.
A kiss without a moustache, they said then, is like an egg without salt; I will add to it: and it is like Good without Evil.
In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.
You're lucky. I'm always conscious of myself —in my mind. Painfully conscious.