Be self-indulgent, and those who are also self-indulgent will like you. Tear your neighbor to pieces, and the other neighbors will laugh. But if you beat your soul, all souls will cry out.
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.
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.
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.
My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think...and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment, it's frightful, if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I...
I admire the way we can lie, putting reason on our side.
Hell is—other people!
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.
Every belief is a belief that falls short; one never wholly believes what one believes.
It is only in our decisions that we are important.
Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.
I do not believe in God his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.
من تقوا ندارم، شاید فرزندان ما باتقوا شوند، بهشرط آنکه ما آنقدر خون جاری کنیم تا حق داشتن فضیلت را به آنها بدهیم.
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 giv...
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...
Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be—and behind them . . . there is nothing. This
It is an abstract change without object. Am I the one who has changed? (...) I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of smal...
I see the insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon.