Commitment is an act, not a word.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.
I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.
Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.
Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?
I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.
If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.
There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.
If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically.
Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.
If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.
Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.
Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.
We must act out passion before we can feel it.
Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.
Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.
There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.
You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.
One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.
What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.
For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.
As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.
If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.
Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.
Existence precedes and rules essence.
God is absence. God is the solitude of man.
Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total... because it may well involve the whole world.
Acting is happy agony.
Words are loaded pistols.
To eat is to appropriate by destruction.
I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.
Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.
Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.
My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.
All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.
I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.
We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.
No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.
Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.
We do not judge the people we love.
I hate victims who respect their executioners.
I confused things with their names: that is belief.
Hell is other people.
The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.
