What never vary are the necessities of being in the world, of having to labor and to die there.

I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good.

I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.

The coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic.

What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterward.

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.

One does not adopt a new idea, one slips into it.