"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."

"My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking."

"We do not judge the people we love."

"Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom-ah the soul-destroying boredom-of long days of mild content."

"Life has no meaning, the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal."

"I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul."

"I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me,and I have followed the source of rivers towards theirsource or plunged into forests, always making for othercities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; andI could never turn back any more than a record can spinin reverse. And all that was leading me where ?To this very moment..."

"Everything has been figured out, except how to live."

"Two people can form a community by excluding a third."

"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, whether they are memories or just fiction."

"It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are."

"A little more and I would have fallen into the mirror trap. I avoided it, but only to fall into the window trap: with nothing to do, my arms dangling, I go over to the window."

"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."

"Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have."

"With older people, it's quite different. They're reliable, they show you what to do, and there's solidity in their affection."

"Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man...."

"Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor."

"I confused things with their names: that is belief."

"There is no reality except in action. Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life."

"Every man ought to say to himself, "Am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?"

"Nothingness haunts Being."

"Well, you're free without wanting to be,' he explained, 'it just happens so, that's all. But Mathieu's freedom is based on reason.''I still don't understand,' said Lola, shaking her head.'Well, he doesn't care a curse about his apartment: he lives there just as he would live anywhere else, and I've got the feeling that he doesn't care much about his girl. He stays with her because he must sleep with someone. His freedom isn't visible, it's inside him."

"You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen."

"I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple."

"No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point."

"This instant which I cannot leave, which locks me in and limits me on every side, this instant I am made of will be no more than a confused dream."

"What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?"

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

"Better a good journalist than a poor assassin."

"I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language."

"Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face. Or perhaps it is because I am a single man? People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?"

"It is only in our decisions that we are important."

"Acting is happy agony."

"Man lives in the midst of images. Literature offers him a critical image of himself."

"Hell is-other people!"

"It would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns...It goes, it goes ... and there's no end to it. It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I."

"Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear."

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

"Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees."

"We must act out passion before we can feel it."

"But I can't see anything any more: however much I search the past I can only retrieve scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, nor whether they are remembered or invented."

"He raised himself on his hands and looked at Irene's face: the nudity of that feminine body had risen into her face, the body had reabsorbed it, as nature reabsorbs forsaken gardens."

"I hate victims who respect their executioners."

"What sort of adventures?' I asked him, astonished. 'All sorts, Monsieur. Getting on the wrong train. Stopping in an unknown city. Losing your briefcase, being arrested by mistake, spending the night in prison. Monsieur, I believe the word adventure could be defined: an event out of the ordinary without being necessarily extraordinary."

"I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing."

"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."

"As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become."

"The existentialist says at once that man is anguish."

"The worst part about being lied to is knowing you werent worth the truth."

"God is absence. God is the solitude of man."