We ordered the speciality of the house, apricot cocktails; [Raymond] Aron said, pointing to his glass: “You see my dear fellow, if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy of it!” Sartre turned pale with emotion at this. Here was just the thing he had been longing to achieve for years – to describe objects just as he saw and touched them, and extract philosophy from the process. Aron convinced him that phenomenology exactly fitted in with his special preoccupations: by-passing the antithesis of idealism and realism, affirming simultaneously both the supremacy of reason and the reality of the visible world as it appears to our senses.

The existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never regard a grand passion as a destructive torrent upon which a man is swept into uncertain actions as by fate, and which, therefore is an excuse for them.

In short, in emotion it is the body which, directed by consciousness, changes its relations with the world in order that the world may change its qualities.

The first procedure of a philosophy ought to be to expel things from consciousness and to reestablish its true connection to the world, to know that consciousness is a positional consciousness of the world.