Jean-Paul Sartre

Death is a continuation of my life without me.

I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.

And I too wanted to be. That is all I wanted; and this is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts which seemed without bounds, I find the same desire again: to drive existence out of me, to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note. That could even make an apologue: there was a poor man who got in the wrong world.

It is disgusting -- Why must we have bodies?

Genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out.

I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.

I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.

My eyes feel all soft, all soft as flesh. I'm going to sleep.

I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think any more, I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I . . . because . . . ugh!

Why do you keep maintaining your ideas are right if you can't prove them?

It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.

One could only damage oneself through the harm one did to others. One could never get directly at oneself.

I’ve dropped out of their hearts like a little sparrow fallen from its nest. So gather me up, dear, fold me to your heart – and you’ll see how nice I can be.

Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.

I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.

She smiled and said with an ecstatic air: "It shines like a little diamond", "What does?" "This moment. It is round, it hangs in empty space like a little diamond; I am eternal.

A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness...and suddenly the “I” pales, pales, and fades out.

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.

I am not asking for sensational revelations, but I would like to sense the meaning of that minute, to feel it's urgency.

Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.