Jean-Paul Sartre

“Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.”

“Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.”

“I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'.”

“Life begins on the other side of despair.”

“Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.”

“Man is what he wills himself to be.”

“The appearance of the other in the world corresponds therefore to a congealed sliding of the whole universe.”

“It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.”

“This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.But you have to choose: live or tell.”

“I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then anything, anything could happen.”

“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”

“Words are loaded pistols.”

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.”

“Hell is—other people!”

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”