"If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature, In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom. On the other hand, if God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuses behind us, no justification before us. We are alone with no excuses.This is the idea I shall try to convey when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet in other respects is free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."

"Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience."

"So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is-other people!"

"Still, somewhere in the depths of ourselves we all harbor an ashamed, unsatisfied melancholy that quietly awaits a funeral."

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

"Words are loaded pistols."

"She smiled and said with an ecstatic air: "It shines like a little diamond","What does?""This moment. It is round, it hangs in empty space like a little diamond; I am eternal."

"If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat."

"There are two ways to go to the gas chamber, free and not free."

"Once freedom lights its beacon in a man's heart the gods are powerless against him."

"Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations."

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

"Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it."

"But no: he was empty, he was confronted by a vast anger, a desperate anger, he saw it and could almost have touched it. But it was inert - if it were to live and find expression and suffer, he must lend it his own body. It was other people's anger. "Swine!" He clenched his fists, he strode along, but nothing came, the anger remained external to himself."

"What's done at night belongs to the night. In the daytime you don't talk about it."

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

"Amuse yourself, torment your desires. Drink when you're thirsty -- that would be very much too simple! If you didn't harbour a temptation eternally in your soul, you'd run the risk of forgetting yourself."

"You're lucky. I'm always conscious of myself -in my mind. Painfully conscious."

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

"You are -- your life, and nothing else."

"At an age when most children are playing hopscotch or with their dolls,you, poor child, who had no friends or toys, you toyed with dreams of murder, because that is a game to play alone."

"We will freedom for freedom's sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim."

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

"He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being."

"Hell is other people."

"A human being who wakened in the morning with a queesy stomach, with fifteen hours to kill before next bedtime, had not much use for freedom."

"One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life."

"Concha would cry when she found out I was dead, she should have no taste for life for months afterward. But I was still the one who was going to die. I thought of her soft, beautiful eyes. when she looked at me something passed her to me. But I knew it was over: if she looked at me now the look would stay in her eyes, it wouldn't reach me. I was alone."

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

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

"Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives."

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

"There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk."

"In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations."

"Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is."

"Emotion is first of all and in principle an accident."

"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."

"He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else's nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon."

"Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth."

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

"So you realized that there were always women in tears, or a red-headed man, or something else to spoil your effects?""Yes, naturally."

"It's the well-behaved children that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don't say a word, they don't hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on, they make society pay dearly."

"How come he cannot recognize his own cruelty now turned against him? How come he can't see his own savagery as a colonist in the savagery of these oppressed peasants who have absorbed it through every pore and for which they can find no cure? The answer is simple: this arrogant individual, whose power of authority and fear of losing it has gone to his head, has difficulty remembering he was once a man; he thinks he is a whip or a gun; he is convinced that the domestication of the "inferior races" is obtained by governing their reflexes. He disregards the human memory, the indelible reminders; and then, above all, there is this that perhaps he never know: we only become what we are by radically negating deep down what others have done to us."

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

"The first crime was mine: I committed it when I made man mortal. Once I had done that, what was left for you, poor human murderers, to do? To kill your victims? But they already had the seed of death in them; all you could do was to hasten its fruition by a year or two."

"For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it."

"There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it."

"Existence precedes and rules essence."

"We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seeded refusal of that which others have made of us."

"Ama bardağımın dibinde biram alıksa, aynada koyu renkli lekeler varsa, fazlalıksam; en içten ve en katı acımsız acım, ayıbalı gibi, hem bir yaşayın et hem gepgeni bir deriyle ve insanın içine dokunan ıslak, ama katılık dolu gözlerle sarılıp hantallaşıyorsa bu benim kabahatim mi?"