We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
History breaks down into images, not into stories.
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
In the world’s structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them.
For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.
If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.