For forty years I was conscripted by the absolute, the neurosis. The absolute is gone. There remain countless tasks among which literature is in no way privileged.

If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.

Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.

Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.

We are our choices.

Before you come alive, life is nothing; it 's up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose.

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

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence.

I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. [It is a matter of choice, not chance.] Such is the first principle of existentialism.

But this wealth of information produced little or no insight.

When the satisfaction or the security of another person becomes as significant to one as one's own satisfaction or security then the state of love exists.

You have to keep adapting to the times. If you kind of go with it, it can kind of fun.

If you are a parent it helps if you are a grown-up.

Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.

My wife's gotten really lazy, or as she calls it, 'pregnant.'

What are the enabling conditions that make human beings flourish? How do we get from zero to plus five?

Let me tell you what the Tea Party stands for. It stands for the fact that we are taxed enough already.

My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.

Provocation polio. That is the truth about those outbreaks of polio. And I offer a well considered personal opinion that polio is a man made disease.