"Nicias, do you think you can erase with good deeds the wrongs you committed against your mother? What good deed will ever reach her? Her soul is a scorching noon time, without a single breath of a breeze, nothing moves, nothing changes, nothing lives there; a great emaciated sun, an immobile sun eternally consumes her."

"A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work."

"The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure nihilation of the In-itself; it is like a hole of being at the heart of Being."

"Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not. He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to recover his inner being."

"Generally speaking there is no irreducible taste or inclination. They all represent a certain appropriative choice of being. It is up to existential psychoanalysis to compare and classify them. Ontology abandons us here; it has merely enabled us to determine the ultimate ends of human reality, its fundamental possibilities, and the value which haunts it."

"But [your crime] will be there, one hundred times denied, always there, dragging itself behind you. Then you will finally know that you have committed your life with one throw of the die, once and for all, and there is nothing you can do but tug our crime along until your death. Such is the law, just and unjust, of repentance. Then we will see what will become of your young pride."

"Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse."

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

"Admit it, it is your youth that you regret, more even than your crime; it is my youth you hate, even more than my innocence."

"Some men are born committed to action: they do not have a choice, they have been thrown on a path, at the end of that path, an act awaits them, their act."

"They are in bad faith — they are afraid — and fear, bad faith have an aroma that the gods find delicious. Yes, the gods like that, the pitiful souls."

"Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets."

"Yes, I am so free. And what a superb absence is my soul."

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

"Her face seems ravaged by both lightning and hail. But on yours there is something like the promise of a storm: one day passion will burn it to the bone."

"I felt less alone when I didn't know you yet: I was waiting for the other. I thought only of his strength and never of my weakness. And now here you are, Orestes, it was you. I look at you and I see that we are two orphans."

"The worst of misfortunes is still a stroke of luck, since one feels oneself living when one experiences it/"

"For man holds his ground only by surpassing himself, in the same sense in which it is said that one ceases to love if one does not love increasingly everyday."

"Similarly, individual acts of aristocratic generosity do not eliminate pauperism; they perpetuate it."

"Genet is a man-failure: he wills the impossible in order to derive from the tragic grandeur of this defeat the assurance that there is something other than the possible."

"Only a neutral, who is indifferent to the stake and perhaps to all stakes, can appreciate aesthetically the grandeur of a fine disaster"

"The consciousness of being betrayed is to the collective consciousness of a sacred group what a certain form of schizophrenia is to the individual...it is a form of madness."

"Moral solipsism."

"It is freedom, it is particularity, it is solitude that we are aiming at, and not Evil for its own sake"

"He chooses the most feared, most hated man in order to worship him as a god, feeling sure that he is alone in perceiving the god's secret virtues."

"His obedience is real since he really and truly fulfills his mission, since he runs real risks in order to carry out the beloved's orders. But, on the other hand, it is imaginary because he submits only to a creature of his mind."

"But since he has decided to have the impossibility of living, every misfortune is an opportunity which lays this importance of living before his eyes and obliges him to decide, once again, to die."

"Abjection is a methodological conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian epoche: it establishes the world as a closed system which consciousness regards from without, in the manner of divine understanding."

"The live dead-man is dead as a producer and alive insofar as he consumes"

"The strangest mores of the most of-the-way societies will, in spite of everything, be relatively comprehensible to the person who has a flesh-and-blood knowledge of man's needs, anxieties, and hopes. If, on the other hand, this experience is lacking, he will not even be able to understand the customs of those about him."

"In doing Good, I lose myself in Being, I abandon my particularity, I become a universal subject."

"...inversion...is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating."

"Since he is unable to be the beloved, he will become the lover."

"His business is here, it is here that he is despised and vilified, it is here that he must carry out his undertaking"

"This inner revolution is realistic because it maintains itself deliberately within the framework of existing institutions; the oppressed reckon with the real situation."

"But when they have realized that it [society] rejects them forever, they themselves assume the ostracism of which they are victims so as not to leave the initiative to their oppressors"

"It was a constraint; he makes of it his mission"

"such mad confidence within despair."

"L’important n’est pas ce qu’on fait de nous mais ce que nous faisons nous-même de ce qu’on a fait de nous."

"esse est percipi, and he recognizes himself as being only insofar as he is perceived."

"I maintain that inversion is the effect of neither a prenatal choice nor an endocrinal malformation nor even the passive and determined result of complexes. It is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating."

"The homosexual never thinks of himself when someone is branded in his presence with the name homosexual. ...His sexual tastes will doubtless lead him to enter into relationships with this suspect category, but he would like to make use of them without being likened to them. Here, too, the ban that is cast on certain men by society has destroyed all possibility of reciprocity among them. Shame isolates."

"The French bourgeois doesn't dislike shit, provided it is served up to him at the right time."

"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."

"I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good."

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

"God is the solitude of men. There was only me: I alone decided to commit Evil; alone, I invented Good. I am the one who cheated, I am the one who performed miracles, I am the one accusing myself today, I alone can absolve myself; me, the man."

"Adieu les monstres! Adieu les saints! Adieu l'orgueil! Il n'y a que des hommes."

"Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil."

"Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk."