1. “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.”
2. "Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is."
3. “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”
4. "Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete."
5. “Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.”
6. “Hell is other people.”
7. "Human life begins on the far side of despair."
8. "I am responsible for everything except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being. Therefore everything takes place as if I were compelled to be responsible. I am abandoned in the world... in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant."
9. “If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.”
10. “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. Thus there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence.”
11. "It is only in our decisions that we are important."
12. "Life begins on the other side of despair."
13. "Life has no meaning the moment you loose the illusion of being eternal."
14. “Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the of it is nothing other than the sense you choose.”
15. "Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth."
16. “Philosophy appears to some people as a homogenous milieu: there thoughts are born and die, there systems are built, and there, in turn, they collapse. Others take Philosophy for a specific attitude which we can freely adopt at will. Still others see it as a determined segment of culture. In our view Philosophy does not exist.”
17. “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
18. "Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself."
19. "My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop. I exist by what I think. and I can't prevent myself from thinking."
20. “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.”
21. "Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat."
22. "One does not adopt a new idea, one slips into it."
23. "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."
24. “Slime is the agony of water.”
25. “So that's what Hell is: I'd never have believed it...Do you remember, brimstone, the stake, the gridiron?...What a joke! No need of a gridiron, Hell is other people.”
26. “The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.”
27. “Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”
28. “Thus suddenly an object has appeared which has stolen the world from me. Everything is in place; everything still exists for me; but everything is traversed by an invisible flight and congealed in the direction of a new object. The appearance of the Other in the world corresponds therefore to a congealed sliding of the whole universe.”
29. “Thus the final state of sexual desire can be swooning as the final state of consent to the body. It is in this sense that desire can be called the desire of one body for another body. It is in fact an appetite directed toward the Other’s body, and it is lived as the vertigo of the for-itself before its own body. The being which desires is consciousness making itself body.”
30. "We must act out passion before we can feel it."
31. "When one does nothing, one believes oneself responsible for everything."
32. "When the rich wage war it is the poor who die."
33. "Words are loaded pistols."
