If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.
Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.
Hell is—other people!
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.
Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.
Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.
We are our choices.
When the rich wage war it's the poor who die.
Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
You are -- your life, and nothing else.
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.
Words are loaded pistols.
Life begins on the other side of despair.
She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.
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.
Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.
The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.
In love, one and one are one.
Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.
Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.
It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.
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.
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.
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.
Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.
Man is what he wills himself to be.
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!
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.
I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.
Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.
That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.
We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.
Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up; I forget them almost immediately.
You must be like me; you must suffer in rhythm.
Existence is an imperfection.
There is only one day left, always starting over: It is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
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?
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.
I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.
Man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does.
Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.
The worst part about being lied to is knowing you werent worth the truth
As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
One always dies too soon — or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are — your life, and nothing else.
As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished.
To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.
I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books.
Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.
There is a universe behind and before him. And the day is approaching when closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left; he will say to himself, "now what?
Little flashes of sun on the surface of a cold, dark sea.
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.
Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.
Life has no meaning, the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.
I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.
I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.
I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'.
In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.
Existence is prior to essence.
Your judgement judges you and defines you
Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
Perhaps its inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is.
It is only in our decisions that we are important.
I am myself and I am here.
To think new thoughts you have to break the bones in your head
I wanted my own words. But the ones I use have been dragged through I don't know how many consciences.
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.
I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.
I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.
Life is a useless passion.
Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.
To eat is to appropriate by destruction.
Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.
What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.
Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.
My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.
I’ve dropped out of their hearts like a little sparrow fallen from its nest. So gather me up, dear, fold me to your heart – and you’ll see how nice I can be.
I confused things with their names: that is belief.
He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.
Acting is happy agony.
Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?
Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.
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.
Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.
Death is a continuation of my life without me...
I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.
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.
The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.
Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.
I do not think therefore I am a moustache
One could only damage oneself through the harm one did to others. One could never get directly at oneself.
One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.
I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.
An individual chooses and makes himself.
Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.
Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of form a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all.
Once freedom lights its beacon in man's heart, the gods are powerless against him.
I hate victims who respect their executioners.
I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.
