From Beyond Good and Evil, p.28
23 Cf. Sartre's famous dictum: "If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. . . Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills . . . Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism. . . Before that projection of the self nothing exists . . Man is responsible for what he is. Thus, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders" ("Existentialism Is a Humanism," included in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufmann, pp. 290f.).
Reading this without showing that Beyond Good and Evil was published in 1886 and Sartre's lecture in 1946, one would scarcely guess at Nietzsche's immense influence on existentialism in general and Sartre in particular; one might even suppose that Nietzsche was here polemicizing against Sartre. Cf. also section 8 of "The Four Great Errors" in Twilight of the Idols (Portable Nietzsche, p. 500), where some implications of the above passage in Beyond Good and Evil are developed briefly.
