I never thought of myself as being in the avant-garde. I said what I had to say, as I was able to say it.

The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change.

A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself.

Habit has a kind of poetry.

Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms. For each of them, love would be the revelation of the self through the gift of the self and the enrichment of the universe.

I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing.

The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.