Everything is permissible if God does not exist, and man is consequently abandoned, for he cannot find anything to rely on – neither within nor without.
Consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.
When the rich fight the rich, it is the poor who die.
What do we mean here by “existence precedes essence”? We mean that man first exists: he materializes in the world, encounters himself, and only afterward defines himself.
Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.
There is no good father, that’s the rule. Don’t lay the blame on men but on the bond of paternity, which is rotten. To beget children, nothing better; to have them, what iniquity!
The revolution you dream of is not ours. You don’t want to change the world, you want to blow it up.
Perception is naturally surpassed toward action; better yet, it can be revealed only in and through projects of action. The world is revealed as an “always future hollow,” for we are always future to ourselves.
Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself.
Man is condemned to be free: condemned, because he did not create himself, yet nonetheless free, because once cast into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
It’s the well-behaved children, that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don’t say a word, they don’t hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on they make society pay dearly. Watch out for good boys.
