I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence.
It is up to you to give life a meaning.
The coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic.
Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.
A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.
I was escaping from Nature and at last becoming myself, that Other whom I was aspiring to be in the eyes of others.
Man exists, turns up, appears on the scene and only afterwards, defines himself.
The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure nihilation of the In-itself; it is like a hole of being at the heart of Being.
Some men are born committed to action: they do not have a choice, they have been thrown on a path, at the end of that path, an act awaits them, their act.
What’s done at night belongs to the night. In the daytime you don’t talk about it.
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 past is the luxury of proprietors.
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.
Is there really nothing, nothing left of me?
To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.
Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not. He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to recover his inner being.
In order to make myself recognized by the Other, I must risk my own life. To risk one’s life, in fact, is to reveal oneself as not-bound to the objective form or to any determined existence – as not-bound to life.
Man must be invented each day.
Why do you keep maintaining your ideas are right if you can’t prove them?
When I can’t see myself in the mirror, I can’t even feel myself, and I begin to wonder if I exist at all.