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"Because by definition it can never be static; to be radical is to constantly live in the territory yet undiscovered, the liberation yet unknown."

"To embody that truth is to live beyond the limits of self-reinforcing habits, which take the narrative of the past, project it onto the future, and obscure the present, leaving us to sleepwalk in the dreamscape of other people’s desires and determinations."

The modern barbarity of ‘saving’ the suicidal is based on a hairraising misapprehension of the nature of existence.

And as terms for deliverance by other means are poor as well, the prisoner will tend to stay in the close vicinity of despair. The acts he then commits to deflect the final stage have a warrant in the principle of vitality itself. In such a moment he is experiencing his soul within the universe, and has no other motive than the utter inendurability of that condition.

He is the universe’s helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities.

"...se convierte en presa propicia para las sectas religiosas, los
espiritistas, los profetas, los curanderos y toda suerte de charlatanes. Porque no sólo ha perdido todo sentido crítico al perder el
contacto con el mundo dado, sino que también se siente ávida de
una verdad definitiva: necesita el remedio, la fórmula, la clave
que la salve súbitamente al salvar al Universo."

"...semejante autonomía intimida, y ella trata de negarla."

"Whereas the existentialist says that the coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic; and that there is always a possibility for the coward to give up cowardice and for the hero to stop being a hero. What counts is the total commitment, and it is not by a particular case or particular action that you are committed altogether."

"Does that mean that I should abandon myself to quietism? No. First I ought to commit myself and then act my commitment, according to the time-honoured formula that “one need not hope in order to undertake one’s work.”

"Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to establish Fascism, and the others may be so cowardly or so slack as to let them do so. If so, Fascism will then be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be such as men have decided they shall be..."

"When Descartes said, “Conquer yourself rather than the world,” what he meant was, at bottom, the same – that we should act without hope."

"You are free, therefore choose, that is to say, invent. No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do: no signs are vouchsafed in this world. The Catholics will reply, “Oh, but they are!” Very well; still, it is I myself, in every case, who have to interpret the signs."

"The existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never regard a grand passion as a destructive torrent upon which a man is swept into certain actions as by fate, and which, therefore, is an excuse for them. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion."

"But in truth, one ought always to ask oneself what would happen if everyone did as one is doing; nor can one escape from that disturbing thought except by a kind of self-deception. The man who lies in self-excuse, by saying “Everyone will not do it” must be ill at ease in his conscience, for the act of lying implies the universal value which it denies. By its very disguise his anguish reveals itself."

"Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism."

“La violencia es la prueba auténtica de la adhesión de cada cual a sí mismo, a sus pasiones, a su propia voluntad; rechazarla radicalmente es encerrarse en una subjetividad abstracta; una ira, una rebelión que no trascienden a los músculos no pasan de ser imaginarias. Es una frustración terrible no poder inscribir los movimientos del corazón sobre la faz de la tierra.”

“So long as the mind keeps silent in the motionless world of its hopes, everything is reflected and arranged in the unity of its nostalgia.”

"As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever-threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own sufferings and joys, builds for all."

“Every wall is a door,” Emerson correctly said. Let us not look for the
door, and the way out, anywhere but in the wall against which we are living. Instead, let us seek the respite where it is—in the very thick of the battle."

"Art advances between two chasms, which are frivolity and propaganda. On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lies the freedom of art."

"The artist constantly lives in such a state of ambiguity, incapable of negating the real and yet eternally bound to question it in its eternally unfinished aspects."

"How, indeed, could art get along without the real and how could art be subservient to it? The artist chooses his object as much as he is chosen by it. Art, in a sense, is a revolt against everything fleeting and unfinished in the world."

"When a ruling class measures its fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe."

“A man’s obedience to his own genius,” Emerson says
magnificently, “is faith in its purest form.”

To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing. Hence the question is not to find out if this is or is not prejudicial to art. The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies , the strange liberty of creation is possible.

"A year now of standing in the wind, not sliding backward, but not progressing. You need to start remembering eventually. The difficult things..."

"Mundane. Boring. She had an inkling that neither would ever accurately describe her life again."

"It was then that she grasped, in the smallest way, the nature of the Command inside her. The will of a god to remake things, to demand they be better.

The power to change."

"They were unraveling. They were failing. They clung to a secret that was escaping despite their best efforts."

"If you truly are sorry you have to take such desperate actions, don’t you owe it to yourself to sit and at least see if there is another way?”