Quotes

Life begins on the other side of despair.

Hell is other people.

[on choice] An individual chooses and makes himself.

[on the German occupation of Paris, 1940] We were terrified of dying, suffering, for a cause that disgusted us. That is, for a disgusting France - corrupt, inefficient, racist, anti-Semite, run by the rich for the rich. No one wanted to die for that until, well until we understood that the Nazis were worse.

Let us imagine that moved by jealousy, curiosity, or vice I have just glued my ear to the door and looked through a keyhole. I am alone and on the level of a non-thetic self-consciousness. This means first of all that there is no self to inhabit my consciousness, nothing therefore to which I can refer my acts in order to qualify them. They are in no way known; I am my acts and hence they carry in themselves their whole justification. I am a pure consciousness of things, and things, caught up in the circuit of my selfness, offer to me their potentialities as the proof of my non-thetic consciousness (of) my own possibilities. This means that behind that door a spectacle is presented as "to be seen," a conversation as "to be heard." ... But all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is looking at me. What does this mean? It means that I am suddenly affected in my being and that essential modifications appear in my structure - modifications which I can apprehend and fix conceptually by means of the reflective cogito. First of all, I now exist as myself for my unreflective consciousness. It is this irruption of the self which has been most often described: I see myself because somebody sees me - as it is usually expressed. ... Only the reflective consciousness has the self directly for an object. The unreflective consciousness does not apprehend the person directly or as its object; the person is presented to consciousness in so far as the person is an object for the Other. This means that all of a sudden I am conscious of myself as escaping myself, not in that I am the foundation of my own nothingness but in that I have my foundation outside myself. I am for myself only as I am a pure reference to the Other.

You know how much I admire Che Guevara. In fact, I believe that the man was not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age: as a fighter and as a man, as a theoretician who was able to further the cause of revolution by drawing his theories from his personal experience in battle.

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.

We will freedom for freedom's sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.

My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think ... and I can't prevent myself from thinking.

People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?

You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it.

Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.

The painful secret of Gods and kings; it is that men are free.

I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.

A family man is never a real family man. An assassin is never entirely assassin. They play a role, you understand. While a dead man, he is really dead. To be or not to be, right?

I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.

I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished.

With despair, true optimism begins: the optimism of the man who expects nothing, who knows he has no rights and nothing coming to him, who rejoices in counting on himself alone and in acting alone for the good of all.

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.

The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.

The world is iniquity; if you accept it, you are an accomplice, if you change it you are an executioner.

I divide men into three categories: those who have a lot of money, those who have none at all and those who have a little. The first want to keep what they have: their interest is to maintain order. The second want to take what they do not have: their interest is to destroy the existing order and to establish one which is profitable to them. They each are realist, people with whom one can agree. The third group want to overthrow the social order to take what they do not have, while still preserving it so that no one takes away what they have. Thus, they preserve in fact what they destroy in theory, or they destroy in fact what they seem to preserve. Those are the idealists.

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light.

I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.