The distance between the being and the conscience is the nothing.
All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other.
We have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is.
She is dearer to me than life. But her suffering comes from within, and only she can rid herself of it. For she is free.
What a torment it is not to be rich! It gets one into such abject situations.
Be self-indulgent, and those who are also self-indulgent will like you. Tear your neighbor to pieces, and the other neighbors will laugh. But if you beat your soul, all souls will cry out.
Perhaps it is impossible to understand one’s own face. Or perhaps it is because I am a single man? People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?
If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.
I would like to see the truth clearly before it is too late.
You didn’t succeed. Well, what of that? There’s nothing to prove, you know, and the revolution’s not a question of virtue but of effectiveness. There is no heaven. There’s work to be done, that’s all. And you must do what you’re cut out for; all the better if it comes easy to you. The best work is not the work that takes the most sacrifice. It’s the work in which you can best succeed.
These young people amaze me; drinking their coffee, they tell clear, plausible stories. If you ask them what they did yesterday, they don’t get flustered; they tell you all about it in a few words. If I were in their place, I’d start stammering. It’s true that for a long time now nobody has bothered how I spend my time. When you live alone, you even forget what it is to tell a story : plausibility disappears at the same time as friends.
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance. I leaned back and closed my eyes. But the images, forewarned, immediately leaped up and filled my closed eyes with existences: existence is a fullness which man can never abandon. Strange.
I get up. I move through this pale light; I see it change beneath my hands and on the sleeves of my coat: I cannot describe how much it disgusts me.
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.
Madame Picard believed that a child should be allowed to read anything: ‘A book never does any harm if it is well written.’ While she was there, I had once asked permission to read Madame Bovary and my mother, in an oversweet voice, had said: ‘But if my darling reads books like that at his age, what will he do when he grows up?’ ‘I shall live them!’ This reply had met with the most complete and lasting success.
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.