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.
There are two ways to go to the gas chamber, free and not free.
My existence began to worry me seriously. Was I not a simple spectre?
Her eyes stare at me but she seems not to see me; she looks as though she were lost in her suffering.
I feel there are no more perfect moments. I feel it in my legs when I walk. I feel it all the time, even when I sleep. I can’t forget it. I am dazzled, uncomfortable, I can’t get used to it.
Don’t you ever get taken that way? When I can’t see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself just to make sure, but it doesn’t help much.
I’m not obstinate, I’m highly strung: I don’t know how to let myself go. I must always think of what is happening to me – it’s a form of self-protection.
And you know what wickedness is, and shame, and fear. There were days when you peered into yourself, into the secret places of your heart, and what you saw there made you faint with horror.
I realized that there was no half-way house between non-existence and this flaunting abundance. If you existed, you had to exist all the way, as far as mouldiness, bloatedness, obscenity were concerned.
From time to time I yawn so widely that tears roll down my cheek.
Everything happens to every man as if the entire human race were staring at him and measuring itself by what he does. So every man ought to be asking himself, “Am I really a man who is entitled to act in such a way that the entire human race should be measuring itself by my actions?” And if he does not ask himself that, he masks his anguish.
Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.
Thing are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea.
Every belief is a belief that falls short; one never wholly believes what one believes.
How far away from them I feel, up on this hill. It seems to me that I belong to another species.
There is something I longed for more than all the rest – without realizing it properly. It wasn’t love, heaven forbid, nor glory, nor wealth. It was... anyway, I had imagined that at certain moments my life could take on a rare and precious quality.
L’homme est une passion inutile.
Love was not something to be felt, not a particular emotion, nor yet a particular shade of feeling, it was much more like a lowering curse on the horizon, a precursor of disaster.
The truth is that I can’t put down my pen: I think I’m going to have the Nausea and I feel as though I’m delaying it while writing. So I write whatever comes into my mind.
Giacometti knows that space is a cancer on being, and eats everything; to sculpt, for him, is to take the fat off space, he compresses space, so as to drain off its exteriority.