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.
To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.
As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.
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.
I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.
Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.
It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.
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.
If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.
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.
The individual's duty is to do what he wants to do, to think whatever he likes, to be accountable to no one but himself, to challenge every idea and every person.
Hell is other people at breakfast.
Genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out.
The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusions … and without resignation either. He stares at death with passionate attention and this fascination liberates him. He experiences the “divine irresponsibility” of the condemned man.
Life gave me everything I asked If all I asked was not a great deal, that's my problem!
All I can do is make the best of what I am, become accustomed to it, evaluate the possibilities, and take advantage of them the best I can.
One of the chief motives of artistic creation is certainly the need of feeling that we are essential in relationship to the world.
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence.
He loves me, he doesn't love my bowels, if they showed him my appendix in a glass he wouldn't recognize it, he's always feeling me, but if they put the glass in his hands he wouldn't touch it, he wouldn't think, "that's hers," you ought to love all of somebody, the esophagus, the liver, the intestines. Maybe we don't love them because we aren't used to them, but if we saw them the way we saw our hands and arms maybe we'd love them; the starfish must love each other better than we do.
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.
Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. [It is a matter of choice, not chance.] Such is the first principle of existentialism.
I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.
Several hours or several years make no difference once you have lost eternity.
We make our own hell out of the people around us.
To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.
Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
It is only in our decisions that we are important.
Philosophy which does not help to illuminate the process of the liberation of the oppressed should be rejected.
I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.
We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.
God is dead. Let us not understand by this that he does not exist or even that he no longer exists. He is dead. He spoke to us and is silent. We no longer have anything but his cadaver. Perhaps he slipped out of the world, somewhere else like the soul of a dead man. Perhaps he was only a dream...God is dead.
I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.
To choose not to choose is still to act.
My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think… and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.
Why do you keep maintaining your ideas are right if you can't prove them?
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.
There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.
We do not judge the people we love.
Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.
I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.
If you seek authenticity for authenticity's sake you are no longer authentic.
The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.
Commitment is an act, not a word.
Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.
Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.
Man is what he wills himself to be.
An individual chooses and makes himself.
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
One should commit no stupidity twice, the variety of choice is, in the end, large enough.
Before you come alive, life is nothing; it 's up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose.
We are possessed by the things we possess. When I like an object, I always give it to someone. It isn't generosity-it's only because I want others to be enslaved by objects, not me.
I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think any more, I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I . . . because . . . ugh!
Because we can imagine, we are free.
I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.
Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.
Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.
In wanting freedom we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others, and that the freedom of others depends on ours. . . I am obliged to want others to have freedom at the same time that I want my own freedom. I can take freedom as my goal only if I take that of others as a goal as well.
I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.
I do not think therefore I am a moustache
When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.
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.
There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
Life begins on the other side of despair.
You are -- your life, and nothing else.
It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.
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.
It is disgusting -- Why must we have bodies?
We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.
Nothingness haunts Being.
I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.
Death is a continuation of my life without me.
Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.
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.
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.
I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then anything, anything could happen.
Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together.
the worst part about being lied to is knowing you werent worth the truth
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.
There are two ways of destroying a people. Either condemn them en bloc or force them to repudiate the leaders they adopted. The second is the worse.
He who asks a question is a fool for a minute; he who does not remains a fool forever. When you realize that by changing your perspective, big things can be seen as little things, it becomes much harder to worry about anything. Commitment is an act, not a word.
Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself.
Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.
In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.
Violence is good for those who have nothing to lose.
We are our choices.
I will not be modest. Humble, as much as you like, but not modest. Modesty is the virtue of the lukewarm.
I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.
Once we know and are aware, we are responsible for our action and our inaction. We can do something about it or ignore it. Either way, we are still responsible.
In love, one and one are one.
Two people can form a community by excluding a third.
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?
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.
I have no religion, but if I were to choose one, it would be that of Shariati's.
Ideas come in pairs and they contradict one another; their opposition is the principal engine of reflection.
I had spent my time counterfeiting eternity.
Once freedom lights its beacon in man's heart, the gods are powerless against him.
Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.
Words are loaded pistols.
I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.
I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.
your judgement judges you and defines you
Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.
Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.
When the rich [and politically powerful] make war, it's the poor [and politically weak] who die.
In a word, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.
Introspection is always retrospection
We must act out passion before we can feel it.
Everything comes to us from others. To Be is to belong to someone.
That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst.
I hate victims who respect their executioners.
Sometimes the truth is too simple for intellectuals.
What the painter adds to the canvas are the days of his life. The adventure of living, hurtling toward death.
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.
Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.
I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.
To think new thoughts you have to break the bones in your head
Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.
What is boredom? It is when there is simultaneously too much and not enough.
Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.
Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.
If you want to deserve Hell, you need only stay in bed. The world is iniquity; if you accept it, you are an accomplice, if you change it you are an executioner.
