Setting fire to the roofs, getting away with the loot, suiting herself. She studied modern philosophy, read Sartre on the side, smoked Gitanes, and cultivated a look of bored contempt. But inwardly, she was seething...

After all, she is lucky. I have been much too calm these past three years. I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity. I leave.

L’importance n’est pas ce que l’on fait de l’Homme, mais ce qu’il fait de ce que l’on a fait de lui”.

I feel my hand. I am these two beasts struggling at the end of my arms. My hand scratches one of its paws with the nail of the other paw; I feel its weight on...

There were no scruples, no feelings of respect or loyal affection that would stop us from making up our minds by the pure light of reason – and of our own desires.

certain details, somewhat curtailed, live in my memory. But I don’t see anything anymore: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what...

[W]hat we also see in sex is a kind of submissiveness. But not a kind of submissiveness which is simply ‘do what you like, I’m just here for you’, but it…is, or can be, very...

There can be no doubt that the chief fault we have developed, through the long course of human evolution, is a certain basic passivity. When provoked by challenges, human beings are magnificent. When life is...

There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.

Whenever the wife wants to do drugs, she thinks about Sartre. One bad trip and then a giant lobster followed him around for the rest of his days.

Existentialism is no mournful delectation but a humanist philosophy of action, effort, combat, and solidarity. Man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he...

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

L’existentialiste, au contraire, pense qu’il est très gênant que Dieu n’existe pas, car avec lui disparaît toute possibilité de trouver des valeurs dans un ciel intelligible; il ne peut plus y avoir de bien a...

It isn’t freedom from. It’s freedom to.

İnsanın kendi yüzünü anlayabilmesi belki de elinde değil. Belki de tek başıma yaşadığım için böyle oluyor. Topluluk içinde yaşayanlar, kendilerini, arkadaşlarına nasıl görünüyorlarsa aynalarda tıpkı öyle görmeyi öğrenmişlerdir. Benim arkadaşım yok. Tenimin bunca çıplak olması...

It would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there’s no end to them and they leave a funny taste in...

Gövde, bir kere yaşamaya başlayınca, bu işe kendi kendine devam eder. Ama düşünce öyle değil. Düşünceyi ben sürdürür, ben geliştiririm. Varoluşmaktayım. Varoluşmakta olduğumu düşünüyorum. Şu varoluşma duygusu ne kıvıl kıvıl bir şey! Onu ben sürdürüyorum...

Amuse yourself, torment your desires. Drink when you’re thirsty — that would be very much too simple! If you didn’t harbour a temptation eternally in your soul, you’d run the risk of forgetting yourself.

Şimdi’nin gerçek özü kendini açığa vuruyordu. Şimdi var olandı, şimdi olmayan hiçbir şey varoluşmuyordu. Geçmiş var olan bir şey değildi. Hem de hiç değildi. Ne eşyada hatta ne de düşüncemde varoluşuyordu. Kendi geçmişimin benden kaçmış...

Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before...

Hiçbir şey değişmedi, ama yine de her şey başka bir biçimde var olup gidiyor. Anlatamıyorum. Bulantıya benziyor bu, ama aynı zamanda onun tam tersi.

It is the reflection of my face. Often in these lost days I study it: I can understand nothing of this face. The faces of others have some sense, some direction. Not mine. I cannot...