Quotes About Authenticity

I am myself and I am here.

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.

Tu n'es rien d'autre que ta vie.

Perhaps it's inevitable; perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all, or impersonating what one is. That would be terrible,' he said to himself: 'it would mean that we were duped by nature.

Je suis seul au milieu de ces voix joyeuses et raisonnables. Tous ces types passent leur temps à s'expliquer, à reconnaître avec bonheur qu'ils sont du même avis. Quelle importance ils attachent, mon Dieu, à penser tous ensemble les mêmes choses.

Il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action… [L'être humain] n'existe que dans la mesure où il se réalise, il n'est donc rien d'autre que sa vie

If you seek authenticity for authenticity's sake you are no longer authentic.

That's what I must avoid: I mustn't put strangeness where there's nothing. I think that is the danger of keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything, you are on the look-out, and you continually stretch the truth.

I had spent my time counterfeiting eternity.

Well, you're free without wanting to be,' he explained, 'it just happens so, that's all. But Mathieu's freedom is based on reason.' 'I still don't understand,' said Lola, shaking her head. 'Well, he doesn't care a curse about his apartment: he lives there just as he would live anywhere else, and I've got the feeling that he doesn't care much about his girl. He stays with her because he must sleep with someone. His freedom isn't visible, it's inside him.

If... if I didn't try to get my life moving on my own account, I should think it just absurd to go on living.' A look of smiling obstinacy had come into Marcelle's face. 'Yes, yes - it's your vice.' 'It's not a vice. It's how I'm made.' 'Why aren't other people made like that, if it isn't a vice?' 'They are, only they don't know it.

I am never any one of my attitudes, any one of my actions

I am not quite sure of being a man: I never found it very difficult. It seemed to me that you had only to let yourself alone.

We have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is.

You are what you are not and are not what you are.

je prenais tout au sérieux, comme si j'avais été immortel.

An existant can never justify the existence of another existant.

I want no secrets or soul-states, nothing ineffable; I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.

The idea is still there, unnameable. It waits, peacefully. Now it seems to say: "Yes? Is that what you wanted? Well, that's exactly what you've never had (remember you fooled yourself with words, you called the glitter of travel, the love of women, quarrels, and trinkets adventure) and this is what you'll never have—and no one other than yourself." But Why? WHY?

Existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him.

Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence. Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such

From time to time I yawn so widely that tears roll down my cheek.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.

You have to talk to make sure you're alive.