An empty room. The light or the rising Sun.

The dawn reflected in your eyes. The doubts echoed in your mind.

I was conscious that tonight, in the fierce sound of the rain, in my solitude, I had been released.

–Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

How could I possibly stretch out my hands towards life when I was being thus enwrapped in beauty?For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.

–Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

A type of cipher seemed to operate in my general experience of life.

As in a corridor of mirrors, a single image is reflected again and again to an endless depth. Things that I had seen in the past were clearly reflected on those that I encountered for the first time, and I felt that I was being led by such resemblances into the inner recesses of the corridor, into some fathomless inner chamber.

–Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

The world had been cast away into relativity and only time was moving.

–Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

But I remained close to people, on the surface of solitude, quite resolved to take refuge in their midst in case of emergency. Up to now I was an amateur at heart.

–Jean Paul Sartre,Nausea

Artist: Panel Kwiatkowski

You let events flow past; suddenly you see people pop up who speak and who go away, you plunge into stories without beginning or end: you'd make a terrible witness.

–Jean Paul Sartre,Nausea

Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up: I forget them almost immediately.

–Jean Paul Sartre,Nausea

If I am not mistaken, if all the signs which have been amassed are precursors of a new overthrow in my life, well then I am terrified.

I'm afraid of what will be born and take possession of me and drag me–where?

Shall I awake in a few months, in a few years, broken, deceived, in the midst of new ruins? I would like to see the truth clearly before it is too late.

–Jean Paul Sartre,Nausea

I think I'm the one who has changed: that's the simplest solution. Also the most unpleasant. But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations.

The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place

–Jean Paul Sartre,Nausea

Something has happened to me, I can't doubt it any more.

It came as an illness does, not like an ordinary certainty, not like anything evident. It came cunningly, little by little; I felt a little strange, a little put out, that's all.

Once established it never moved, it stayed quiet, and I was able to persuade myself that nothing was the matter with me, that it was a false alarm. And now, it's blossoming.

–Jean Paul Sartre,Nausea

And this great, meaningless, utterly dark reality was given to me, was pressed on me, with a weight that I had until then never witnessed.

Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

/Artist: Dragan Bibin/

If,moreover, existence precedes essence and we will to exist at the same time as we fashion our image, that image is valid for all and for our whole era.

Our responsibility is thus much greater than we might have supposed, because it concerns all mankind.

–Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

When we say that man chooses himself, not only do we mean that each of us must choose himself, but also that in choosing himself, he is choosing for all men.

–Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

–Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

–Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

...man first exists, encounters himself and emerges in the world, to be defined afterwards.

Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it.

It is man who conceives himself, who propels himself towards existence. Man becomes nothing other than what is actually done, not what he will want to be.

–Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism