Quotes About Self

one can never know oneself but only narrate oneself

Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects. pg. xxxiii

To lose confidence in one's body is to lose confidence in oneself.

One is not born a woman, one becomes one.

Ik koos het bestaan niet, maar ik besta. Een ongerijmdheid die verantwoordelijk voor zichzelf is, dat ben ik.

The nihilist is right in thinking that the world _possesses_ no justification and that he himself _is_ nothing. But he forgets that it is up to him to justify the world and to make himself exist validly.

I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me.

We only exist if we act.

To be no one, all things considered, is something of a privilege.

Humans are the beings whose essence is in not having an essence

With regard to us, she often displayed a cruel unkindness that was more thoughtless than sadistic: her desire was not to cause us unhappiness but to prove her own power to herself.

The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.

Por qué ya no me quiere? Habría que saber porqué me ha querido. Una no se plantea la cuestión. Incluso si no se es ni orgullosa ni narcisista, es tan extraordinario ser una misma, justamente una misma, esto es tan único que parece natural que sea único también para alguien más. Me quería, es todo. Y para siempre ya que siempre seré yo.

He draws the motivations of his moral attitude from within the character which he has given himself and from within the universe which is its correlative.

La femme, comme l'homme, est son corps: mais son corps est autre chose qu'elle.

Le nom, c'est ma présence totale rassemblée magiquement dans l'objet.

Cada hombre decide el lugar que ocupa en el mundo; pero es necesario que ocupe uno, jamás puede retirarse.

No se modifica la vida sin modificarse a uno mismo

Man exists .For him it is not a question of wondering whether his presence in the world is useful, wheter life is worth the trouble of being lived. These questions make no sense. It is a matter of knowing whether he wants to live and under what conditions.

Mi acción no es para otro sino lo que él mismo la hace ser: ¿cómo puedo, pues, saber de antemano lo que hago?; y si no lo sé, ¿cómo puedo proponerme obrar por la humanidad?

They bear the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of themselves, where their defeats are inscribed, and their victories as well.

But it is not solipsistic, since the individual is define only by her relationship to the world and to other individuals; she exists only by transcending herself, and her freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others.

it is not the Other who, defining itself as Other, defines the One; the Other is posited as Other by the One positing itself as One. But in order for the Other not to turn into the One, the Other has to submit to this foreign point of view.

Mi ero voluta senza limiti ed ero informe come l'infinito