Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The work of memory collapses time.
The distracted person, too, can form habits.
All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
History breaks down into images, not into stories.
I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.
In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.