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.

In the state I was in, if someone had come and told me I could go home quietly, that they would leave me my life whole, it would have left me cold: several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.

There is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving.

Time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.

Take [Stéphane] Mallarme. I hold him to be the greatest of French poets, and I have taken some time to understand him !

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?

Words are loaded pistols.