"I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist."

"Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself."

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

"Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do."

"Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait."

"Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat."

"Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."

"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."

"He takes a few dazed steps, the waiters turn out the lights and he slips into unconsciousness: when this man is lonely he sleeps."

"What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be."

"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you."

"I go, I go away, I walk, I wander, and everywhere I go I bear my shell with me, I remain at home in my room, among my books, I do not approach an inch nearer to Marrakech or Timbuktu. Even if I took a train, a boat, or a motor-bus, if I went to Morocco for my holiday, if I suddenly arrived at Marrakech, I should be always in my room, at home. And if I walked in the squares and in the sooks, if I gripped an Arab's shoulder, to feel Marrakech in his person - well, that Arab would be at Marrakech, not I : I should still be seated in my room, placid and meditative as is my chosen life, two thousand miles away from the Moroccan and his burnoose. In my room. Forever."

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

"Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices."

"When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die."

"What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterward."

"Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth."

"You didn't succeed. Well, what of that? There's nothing to prove, you know, and the revolution's not a question of virtue but of effectiveness. There is no heaven. There's work to be done, that's all. And you must do what you're cut out for; all the better if it comes easy to you. The best work is not the work that takes the most sacrifice. It's the work in which you can best succeed."

"She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist."

"It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous."

"All I want is' - and he uttered the final words through clenched teeth and with a sort of shame - 'to retain my freedom.'I should myself have thought,' said Jacques, 'that freedom consisted in frankly confronting situations into which one had deliberately entered, and accepting all one's responsibilities. But that, no doubt, is not your view."

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

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

"After all, she is lucky. I have been much too calm these past three years. I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity. I leave."

"Commitment is an act, not a word."

"The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it."

"Only he who knows how to speak can be silent."

"That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget."

"Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it any more. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them."

"I've lived the life of a man without teeth, he thought about it. A life of a man without teeth. I've never bitten, I've been waiting, keeping myself for later - and now I've just ascertained that I don't have teeth anymore."

"All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books."

"In love, one and one are one."

"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."

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

"People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing."

"Naturally, in the course of my life I have made lots of mistakes, large and small, for one reason or another, but at the heart of it all, every time I made a mistake it was because I was not radical enough."

"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."

"The bond between being and non-being can be only internal. It is within being qua being that non-being must arise, and within non-being that being must spring up; and this relation can not be a fact, a natural law, but an upsurge of the being which is its own nothingness of being."

"There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck."

"If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically."

"People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?"

"I see the insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon."

"The most clear-sided view of the darkest possible situation is itself an act of optimism."

"It is the good children, Madame, who make the most terrible revolutionaries. They say nothing, they do not hide under the table, they eat only one sweet at a time, but later on, they make Society pay dearly for it!"

"Freedom is what we do with what is done to us."

"Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think."

"The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best."

"All men are Prophets or else God does not exist."

"If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company."

"A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost."