"To eat is to appropriate by destruction."

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

"Existentialism is no mournful delectation but a humanist philosophy of action, effort, combat, and solidarity. Man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines say what this man is before he dies, or what mankind is before it has disappeared."

"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."

"The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose not his individuality but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him."

"In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team."

"Man is free rather than man is freedom."

"If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble."

"We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact."

"I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it."

"All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure."

"To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe."

"Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse."

"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."

"Life begins on the other side of despair."

"Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them."

"It is the reflection of my face. Often in these lost days I study it: I can understand nothing of this face. The faces of others have some sense, some direction. Not mine. I cannot even decide whether it is handsome or ugly. I think it is ugly because I have been told so. But it doesn't strike me. At heart, I am even shocked that anyone can attribute qualities of this kind to it, as if you called a clod of earth or a block of stone beautiful or ugly."

"People. You must love people. Men are admirable. I wantto vomit-and suddenly, there it is: the Nausea."

"I murmur: "It's a seat," a little like an exorcism. But the word stays on my lips: it refuses to go and put itself on the thing. It stays what it is, with its red plush, thousands of little red paws in the air, all still, little dead paws. This enormous belly turned upward, bleeding, inflated-bloated with all its dead paws, this belly floating in this car, in this grey sky, is not a seat. It could just as well be a dead donkey tossed about in the water, floating with the current, belly in the air in a great grey river, a river of floods; and I could be sitting on the donkey's belly, my feet dangling in the clear water."

"The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity."

"I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men."

"It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish."

"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."

"Man is not only that which he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be..."

"Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry."

"I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating."

"Love or hatred calls for self-surrender. He cuts a fine figure, the warm-blooded, prosperous man, solidly entrenched in his well-being, who one fine day surrenders all to love-or to hatred; himself, his house, his land, his memories."

"But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place."

"When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die."

"You talk a lot about this amazing flow of time but you hardly see it. you see a women, you think that one day she'll be old, only you don't see her grow old. But there are moments when you think you see her grow old and feel yourself growing old with her: this is the feeling of adventure."

"My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them."