Then I realized what separated us: what I thought about him could not reach him; it was psychology, the kind they write about in books. But his judgment went through me like a sword and questioned my very right to exist. And it was true, I had always realized it; I hadn't the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe. My life put out feelers towards small pleasures in every direction. Sometimes it sent out vague signals; at other times I felt nothing more than a harmless buzzing.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free, Aegistheus. You know it and they do not.

Everything in my past, in my training, everything that has been most essential in my activity up to now has made me above all a man who writes, and it is too late for that to change.

Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.

Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom-ah the soul-destroying boredom-of long days of mild content.

There are two kinds of existentialist; first, those who are Christian...and on the other hand the atheistic existentialists, among whom...I class myself. What they have in common is that they think that existence precedes essence, or, if you prefer, that subjectivity must be the turning point.