As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.

What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.

Words are loaded pistols.

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

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

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

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

Hell is other people.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.

As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

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.

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

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

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

Acting is happy agony.

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.

The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.

We do not judge the people we love.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.

When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

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

Life has no meaning the moment you loose the illusion of being eternal.

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

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.

When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.

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