Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I wanted my own words. But the ones I use have dragged through I don't know how many consciences.
The more one is absorbed in fighting evil, the less one is tempted to place the good in question.
What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.
I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.
The world would get along very well without literature. It would get along even better without man.
The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free, Aegistheus. You know it and they do not.
A good hanging now and then -- that entertains folk in the provinces and robs death of its glamour.
If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light.
The revolution you dream of is not ours. You don't want to change the world; you want to blow it up.
As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.
This desire [to write] is rather strange all the same and is not without a certain "cracked" quality.
If you begin by saying, 'Thou shalt not lie,' there is no longer any possibility of political action.
I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.
I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.
Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.
Everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident
What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal... For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space.
We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.
I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.
Outside nature, against nature, without excuse, beyond remedy, except what remedy I find within myself.
Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.
I entered the Communist Party because its cause was just and I will leave it when it ceases to be just.
Time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.
I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.
I have seen children dying of hunger. Over against a dying child La Nausee cannot act as a counterweight.
I will not be modest. Humble, as much as you like, but not modest. Modesty is the virtue of the lukewarm.
When I can't see myself in the mirror, I can't even feel myself, and I begin to wonder if I exist at all.
Un homme n'est rien d'autre qu'une se rie d'entreprises. A man is no other than a series of undertakings.
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.
A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.
One could only damage oneself through the harm one did to others. One could never get directly at oneself.
A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness...and suddenly the “I” pales, pales, and fades out.
My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.
There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.
Do you think I can read [Alain] Robbe-Grillet in an underdeveloped country? He does not feel himself maimed.
Ideas come in pairs and they contradict one another; their opposition is the principal engine of reflection.
The appearance of the other in the world corresponds therefore to a congealed sliding of the whole universe.
I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.
What the painter adds to the canvas are the days of his life. The adventure of living, hurtling toward death.
Absurd, irreducible; nothing--not even a profound and secret delirium of nature--could explain [a tree root].
Perhaps its inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is.
You see, the contemporary writer must write through his intimations of unease, while trying to elucidate them.
Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.
Philosophy which does not help to illuminate the process of the liberation of the oppressed should be rejected.
Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.
I was escaping from Nature and at last becoming myself, that Other whom I was aspiring to be in the eyes of others.
[Contemporary writer] could be a kind of [Samuel] Beckett who would not be felt to be totally committed to despair.
I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.