"Never have I felt as strongly as today that I was devoid of secret dimensions, limited to my body, to the airy thoughts which float up from it like bubbles. I build my memories with my present. I am rejected, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past; I cannot escape from myself."

"When we say that man chooses his own self, we mean that every one of us does likewise; but we also mean by that that in making this choice he also chooses all men. In fact, in creating the man that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be. To choose to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all."

"Man being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being."

"In the introduction to Being and Nothingness, Sartre details his rejection of Kant’s concept of noumenon. Kant was an idealist, believing that we have no direct way of perceiving the external world and that all we have access to is our ideas of the world, including what our senses tell us. Kant distinguished between phenomena, which are our perceptions of things or how things appear to us, and noumena, which are the things in themselves, which we have no knowledge of. Against Kant, Sartre argues that the appearance of a phenomenon is pure and absolute. The noumenon is not inaccessible—it simply isn’t there. Appearance is the only reality. From this starting point, Sartre contends that the world can be seen as an infinite series of finite appearances. Such a perspective eliminates a number of dualisms, notably the duality that contrasts the inside and outside of an object. What we see is what we get (or, what appears is what we know)."

"The more one is absorbed in fighting evil, the less one is tempted to place the good in question."

"Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind."

"Consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being."

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

"It helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations."

"Man is what he wills himself to be."