I can't kill myself — I have more books to read!

It is also true that the most optimistic ethics have all begun by emphasizing the element of failure involved in the condition of man; without failure, no ethics; for a being who, from the very start, would be an exact co-incidence with himself, in a perfect plenitude, the notion of having-to-be would have no meaning. One does not offer an ethics to a God. It is impossible to propose any to man if one defines him as nature, as something given.

This privilege, which [mankind] alone possesses, of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects, is what he shares with all his fellow-men. In turn an object for others, he is nothing more than an individual in the collective on which he depends.

My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think... and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment— it's frightful —if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: the hatred, the disgust of existing, there are as many ways to make myself exist, to thrust myself into existence.

The thing which was waiting was on the alert, it has pounced on me, it flows through me, I am filled with it. It's nothing: I am the Thing. Existence, liberated, detached, floods over me. I exist. I exist. It's sweet, so sweet, so slow. And light: you'd think it floated all by itself. It stirs. It brushes by me, melts and vanishes. Gently, gently.

It is high time to replace the Kantian question, "How are synthetic judgements a priori possible?" by another question, "Why is belief in such judgements necessary?"— and to comprehend that such judgements must be believed to be true, for the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves; though they might, of course, be false judgements for all that! Or to speak more clearly and coarsely: synthetic judgements a priori should not "be possible" at all; we have no right to them; in our mouths they are nothing but false judgements. Only, of course, the belief in their truth is necessary, as a foreground belief and visual evidence belonging to the perspective optics of life.

But man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chessplayer, loves only the process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (one cannot swear to it), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, or in other words, in life itself, and not particularly in the goal which of course must always be two times two makes four, that is a formula, and after all, two times two makes four is no longer life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death. ... Granted that man does nothing but seek that two times two makes four, that he sails the oceans, sacrifices his life in the quest, but to succeed, really find it — he is somehow afraid, I assure you. He feels that as soon as he has found it there will be nothing for him to look for.

You see, gentlemen, reason, gentlemen, is an excellent thing, there is no disputing that, but reason is only reason and can only satisfy man's rational faculty, while will is a manifestation of all life, that is, of all human life including reason as well as all impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life nevertheless and not simply extracting square roots. ... Human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives.

The more passionately something moves [one], and the more intimately it penetrates his being, the stronger is the urge also to glimpse its power outside himself in others, in order to prove to himself that he has encountered nothing other than what is human.

We are so involved in each other and the world that we cannot be content to view truth disinterestedly.

A man who can keep the different segments of his life entirely separated, who can punch the clock every day at exactly the same moment, whose actions are always predictable, who is never troubled by irrational urges or poetic visions, who indeed can manipulate himself the same way he would the machine whose levers he pulls, is of course the most profitable worker, not only on the assembly line but even on many of the higher levels of production. As Marx and Nietzsche pointed out, the corollary is likewise true: the very success of the industrial system, with its accumulation of money as a validation of personal worth entirely separate from the actual product of a man's hands, had a reciprocal depersonalizing and dehumanizing effect upon man in his relation to others and himself. It was against these dehumanizing tendencies to make man into a machine, to make him over in the image of the industrial system for which he labored, that the early existentialists fought so strongly.

You yourself are a compendium of humanity.

The real work of the committed writer is ... to reveal, demonstrate, demystify, and dissolve myths and fetishes in a critical acid bath.

An insane pride is necessary to write — you can only afford to be modest after you've sunk your pride into your work.