Albert Camus's First Diary

"A certain number of years lived without money are enough to create a whole sensibility." Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (New York: Other Press, 2016), p. 147.

Gabriel Marcel in 'On the Ontological Mystery'

"I know by my own experience how, from a stranger met by chance, there may come an irresistible appeal which overturns the habitual perspectives just as a gust of wind might tumble down the panels of a stage set - what had seemed near becomes infinitely remote and what had seemed distant seems to be close."

David Gascoyne on War

"What is so detestable about war is that it reduces the individual to complete insignificance."

Heidegger's Lack of Character

"It wasn't that Heidegger had a bad character, Hannah Arendt wrote to Jaspers in 1949; it was that he had no character. Sartre said a very similar thing in any essay of 1944, speaking of Heidegger's Nazism: 'Heidegger has no character; there's the truth of the matter.' It is as if there was something about everyday human life that the great philosopher of everydayness did not get." Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (New York: Other Press, 2016), p. 92.

Sarah Bakewell on Heidegger's 'Being-towards-Death', Particularity, and Germanocentrism

"But Heidegger disliked the notion of universal truths or universal humanity, which he considered a fantasy. For him, Dasein is not defined by shared faculties of reason and understanding, as the Enlightenment philosophers thought. Still less is it defined by any kind of transcendent eternal soul, as in religious tradition. We do not exist on a higher, eternal plane at all. Dasein's Being is local: it has a historical situation, and is constituted in time and place." At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (New York: Other Press, 2016), p. 87.

Plato's 'The Sophist' as recounted by Heidegger in 'Being and Time.'

"For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression 'being'. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed."

St. Augustine and Idealism

"Do not wish to go out; go back into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man."

Merleau-Ponty on the Relationship Between Life and Ideas

"A discussion is not an exchange or a confrontation of ideas, as if each formed his own, showed them to others, looked at theirs, and returned to correct them with his own... Whether he speaks up or hardily whispers, each one speaks with all that he is, with his 'ideas', but also with his obsessions, his secret history."

Jean-Paul Sartre on Freedom

"There is no traced-out path to lead man to his salvation; he must constantly invent his own path. But, to invent, he is free, responsible, without excuse, and very hope lies within him."