Use Font Awesome icon as CSS content

You should have font-weight set to 900 for Font Awesome 5 Free font-family to work.

This is the working one:

.css-selector::before {
   font-family: 'Font Awesome 5 Free';
   content: "\f101";
   font-weight: 900;
}

Another solution without you having to manually mess around with the Unicode characters can be found in Making Font Awesome awesome - Using icons without i-tags (disclaimer: I wrote this article).

In a nutshell, you can create a new class like this:

.icon::before {
    display: inline-block;
    margin-right: .5em;
    font: normal normal normal 14px/1 FontAwesome;
    font-size: inherit;
    text-rendering: auto;
    -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
    -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;
    transform: translate(0, 0);
}

And then use it with any icon, for example:

<a class="icon fa-car" href="#">This is a link</a>

Update for FontAwesome 5 ^{Thanks to Aurelien}

You need to change the font-family to Font Awesome 5 Brands OR Font Awesome 5 Free, based on the type of icon you are trying to render. Also, do not forget to declare font-weight: 900;

a:before {
   font-family: "Font Awesome 5 Free";
   content: "\f095";
   display: inline-block;
   padding-right: 3px;
   vertical-align: middle;
   font-weight: 900;
}

Demo

You can read the rest of the answer below to understand how it works and to know some workarounds for spacing between icon and the text.

---

FontAwesome 4 and below

That's the wrong way to use it. Open the font awesome style sheet, go to the class of the font you want to use say fa-phone, copy the content property under that class with the entity, and use it like:

a:before {
    font-family: FontAwesome;
    content: "\f095";
}

Demo

Just make sure that if you are looking to target a specific a tag, then consider using a class instead to make it more specific like:

a.class_name:before {
    font-family: FontAwesome;
    content: "\f095";
}

Using the way above will stick the icon with the remaining text of yours, so if you want to have a bit of space between the two of them, make it display: inline-block; and use some padding-right:

a:before {
    font-family: FontAwesome;
    content: "\f095";
    display: inline-block;
    padding-right: 3px;
    vertical-align: middle;
}

---

Extending this answer further, since many might be having a requirement to change an icon on hover, so for that, we can write a separate selector and rules for :hover action:

a:hover:before {
    content: "\f099"; /* Code of the icon you want to change on hover */
}

Demo

Now in the above example, icon nudges because of the different size and you surely don't want that, so you can set a fixed width on the base declaration like

a:before {
    /* Other properties here, look in the above code snippets */
    width: 12px; /* add some desired width here to prevent nudge */
}

Demo

If you have access to SCSS files from font-awesome, you can use this simple solution:

.a:after {
    // Import mixin from font-awesome/scss/mixins.scss
    @include fa-icon();

    // Use icon variable from font-awesome/scss/variables.scss
    content: $fa-var-exclamation-triangle;
}