The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.
Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge.
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
No more semblance or disemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic of the principle of operativity.
How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.
The expressions of those moving about a picture gallery show ill-concealed disappointment that they only find pictures there.
There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.
What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.
The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.
Every line we succeed in publishing today – no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it – is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness.
What has been forgotten…. is never something purely individual.
To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.
As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man.
Historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but actualization.
Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.
The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.