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1 " It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are. "
― Jean-Paul Sartre , Being and Nothingness
2 " It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish. "
3 " Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm. "
4 " I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating. "
5 " Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations. "
6 " Life is a useless passion. "
7 " I must be without remorse or regrets as I am without excuse; for from the instant of my upsurge into being, I carry the weight of the world by myself alone without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant. "
8 " The appearance of the other in the world corresponds therefore to a congealed sliding of the whole universe. "
9 " The recruit who reports for active duty at the beginning of the war can in some instances be afraid of death, but more often he is 'afraid of being afraid'; that is, he is filled with anguish before himself. "
10 " Temporality is obviously an organised structure, and these three so-called elements of time: past, present, future, must not be envisaged as a collection of 'data' to be added together...but as the structured moments of an original synthesis. Otherwise we shall immediately meet with this paradox: the past is no longer, the future is not yet, as for the instantaneous present, everyone knows that it is not at all: it is the limit of infinite division, like the dimensionless point. "
11 " Nothingness carries being in its heart. "
12 " From the very fact, indeed, that I am conscious of the motives which solicit my action, these motives are already transcendent objects from my consciousness, they are outside; in vain shall I seek to cling to them: I escape from them through my very existence. I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the affective and rational motives of my act: I am condemned to be free. "
13 " We have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is. "
14 " Time gnaws and wears away; it separates; it flies. And by virtue of separation--by separating man from his pain or from the object of his pain--time cures. "
15 " Freedom is what we do with what is done to us "
16 " ...man is a useless passion. "
17 " To believe is to know that one believes, and to know that one believes is no longer to believe. "
18 " Every belief is a belief that falls short; one never wholly believes what one believes. "
19 " The flesh is the pure contingency of presence. "
20 " In irony a man annihilates what he posits within one and the same act; he leads us to believe in order not to be believed; he affirms to deny and denies to affirm; he creatives a positive object but it has no being other than its nothingness. "