The bond that attaches us to the life outside ourselves is the same bond that holds us to our own life.

Modern Existentialism... is a total European creation, perhaps the last philosophic legacy of Europe to America or whatever other civilization is now on its way to supplant Europe.

From what deep springs of character our personal philosophies issue, we cannot be sure. In philosophers themselves we seem always able to notice some deep internal correspondence between the man and his philosophy. Are our philosophies, then, merely the inevitable outcome of the body of fate and personal circumstance that is thrust upon each of us? Or are these beliefs the means by which we freely create ourselves as the persons we become? Here, at the very outset, the question of freedom already hovers in the background.

The bond that attaches us to the life outside ourselves is the same bond that holds us to our own life.

We must be free for the truth; and conversely, to be able to be open toward the truth may be our deepest freedom as human creatures.

The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived.

It is the familiar that usually eludes us in life. What is before our nose is what we see last.