I wrote Sophies World in three months, but I was only writing and sleeping. I work for 14 hours a day when Im working on a book.

the very best that can happen is to have energetic opponents. The more extreme they become, the more powerful the reaction they will have to face.

Athens is like a sluggish horse, and I am the gadfly trying to sting it into life.

It was all too easy to make things up, it was like skating on thin ice, it was like doing dainty pirouettes on a brittle crust over water thousands of fathoms deep.

Dear Hilde, if the human brain was simple enough for us to understand, we would still be so stupid that we couldn't understand it. Love, Dad.

For nature is good, an man is 'by nature' good; it is civilization which ruins him

Throughout the entire history of philosophy, philosophers have sought to discover what man is - or what human nature is. But Sartre believed that man has no such eternal nature to fall back on. It is therefore useless to search for the meaning of life in general. We are condemned to improvise. We are like actors dragged onto the stage without having learned our lines, with no script and no prompter to whisper stage directions to us. We must decide for ourselves how to live.