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"Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself."
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"I am alive because you want me to."

"He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree."

"Their pleasures are fierce and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part."

"You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability fo the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess it out beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all."

"Existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him."

"To live was to be a fragment of the cosmere that was experiencing itself."
Explore more quotes by Jean-Paul Sartre

"Existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him."

"One can ask why the I has to appear in the cogito {Descartes' argument "I think therefore I am.}, since the cogito, if used rightly, is the awareness of pure consciousness, not directed at any fact or action. In fact the I is not necessary here, since it is never united directly to consciousness. One can even imagine a pure and self-aware consciousness which thinks of itself as impersonal spontaneity."

"Much more likely you'll hurt me. Still what does it matter? If I've got to suffer, it may as well be at your hands, your pretty hands."

"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. None of this is so important, to be sure. The world can get by nicely without literature. But without human beings it can get by better yet."

"The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that "the good exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote: "If God did not exist, everything would be permitted; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse."
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