To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present.
True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
The distracted person, too, can form habits.
We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.
No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.
The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.
Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.