What follows is some short quotes from my reading of Jean-Paul Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism". These quotes were originally tweeted by me.
"every truth and every action imply both an environment and a human subjectivity."
"existence comes before essence"
"In the philosophic atheism of the 18th century, the notion of God is suppressed, but not...the idea that essence is prior to existence"
For Enlightenment materialism,
"the essence of man precedes that historic existence which we confront in experience."
"man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards."
"Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism."
"If...it is true that existence is prior to essence, man is responsible for what he is."
"God does not exist, and...it is necessary to draw the consequences of his absence right to the end"
"There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it."
"man is free, man is freedom."
"we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse."
"I can neither seek within myself for an authentic impulse to action, nor can I expect, from some ethic, formulae that will enable me to act"
"No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do"
"You are free, therefore choose, that is to say, invent."
"Our aim is precisely to establish the human kingdom as a pattern of values in distinction from the material world."
"The other is indispensable to my existence, and equally so to any knowledge I can have of myself."
"It is in this world that man has to decide what he is..."
"although it is impossible to find in each and every man a universal essence...there is nevertheless a human universality of condition."
"man finds himself in an organised situation in which he is himself involved"
"There is this in common between art and morality, that in both we have to do with creation and invention."
"the actions of men of good faith have, as their ultimate significance, the quest of freedom itself as such."
"Those who hide from this total freedom, in a guise of solemnity or with deterministic excuses, I shall call cowards."
"to say that we invent values means neither more nor less than this; that there is no sense in life a priori."
"an existentialist will never take man as the end, since man is still to be determined."
"Man is all the time outside of himself: it is in projecting and losing himself beyond himself that he makes man to exist"
"we remind man that there is no legislator but himself; that he himself, thus abandoned, must decide for himself"
"Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position."
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