“It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality.”

Death as the destruction of all things no longer had meaning when life was revealed to be a fatuous sequence of empty words, the hollow jingle of a jester’s cap and bells.

We are entering the age of infinite examination and of compulsory objectification.

The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

Where there is power, there is resistance.

In civilizations without ships, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of corsairs.

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.

Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.

There is no glory in punishing.

With humanity, life has ended up with a living creature that never quite finds itself in the right place, a living creature destined to wander and endlessly make mistakes.

I don’t write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.

It’s amazing how people like judging.

The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness.

From the point of view of wealth, there is no difference between need, comfort, and pleasure.

Islam, in the year 1978, was not the opium of the people precisely because it was the spirit of a world without spirit.

I’m not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.

Being is essentially different from a being, from beings.

The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story.

Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence.

The question of existence never gets straightened out except through existing itself.

To be is to do.

This is the most profound question in life: ‘What is the nature of my existence?’

There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.

We are too late for the gods and too early for Being.