"Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism."
 

"When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself, but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men."
 

"Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does."
 

"Since we have defined the situation of man as one of free choice, without excuse and without help, any man who takes refuge behind the excuse of his passions, or by inventing some deterministic doctrine, is a self-deceiver."
 

"Liberty is a structure of human acting and appears only by engagement; determinism is a law of the world."
 

"The word 'one world', that the Americans hold in high esteem, does inter alia mean: Everybody is responsible for everything that happens in the world."
 

"If a writer has choosen to be silent on a certain aspect of the world, one is entitled to ask him: Why did you prefer to speak about this and not about that? And you do speak in order to change something - because one cannot speak otherwise -, why do you prefer to change this and not that?"
 

"We are not the keepers of eternal values, because liberty is concrete."
 

"We, the rats without cerebellum, are constituted in a way, that we must either peg out or invent the human being."
 

"Art is always the representation of the world as it would be, if human liberty would have taken it."
 

"What does literature mean in a world of starvation? Like morality even literature has to be general."
 

"If a written sentence does not reverberate on every level of man and society, it signifies nothing. The literature of one epoch is the epoch digested through its literature."
 

"One doesn't think the human reality, one lives it, because it is the paradox, the conflict without synthesis. Man is those being which one urges on with the sword to ascend on the throne of God, and which cannot reach it."
 
 
 

 Sartre's "Truth and Existence"  (only German)
 
 

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