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.
But no: he was empty, he was confronted by a vast anger, a desperate anger, he saw it and could almost have touched it. But it was inert – if it were to live and find expression and suffer, he must lend it his own body. It was other people’s anger. Swine! He clenched his fists, he strode along, but nothing came, the anger remained external to himself.
One can ask why the I has to appear in the cogito {Descartes’ argument “I think therefore I am.}, since the cogito, if used rightly, is the awareness of pure consciousness, not directed at any fact or action. In fact the I is not necessary here, since it is never united directly to consciousness. One can even imagine a pure and self-aware consciousness which thinks of itself as impersonal spontaneity.
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.
I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.
If I didn’t try to assume responsibility for my own existence, it would seem utterly absurd to go on existing.
In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.
In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.
He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.
She smiled and said with an ecstatic air: “It shines like a little diamond”,
“What does?”
“This moment. It is round, it hangs in empty space like a little diamond; I am eternal.
There is only one day left, always starting over: It is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.
I never could bear the idea of anyone’s expecting something from me. It
always made me want to do just the opposite.
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.
It answers the question that was tormenting you: my love, you are not ‘one thing in my life’ – not even the most important – because my life no longer belongs to me because…you are always me.
Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.
I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.
It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.
Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else’s nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon.